D A V I D    B R Y A N T    S T U D I O

T H E  C A R S  O F  D E L  B A X T E R

D E L  B A X T E R has had a hideous life.  There are moments in this book, CAR, when people want to reach out and help him.  But no one can find him.  His solitary life on the shores of the Salton Sea is not fit for any man, yet he presses on.  Driving a Ford Pinto, on the rare occasions that it runs, he uses the small, unsafe, orange car to tour the perimeter of the Sea and to go as far south as El Centro, California where he finds scrap wood and broken tools to further his mission of making cars - California custom cars in miniature, from the debris found in poor places.  This is a business plan that fits his failed life.

Del’s earliest recollection builds a biography bathed in darkness:

“It was 1951. I was three.  My father made an excuse, ‘I’m going out for cigarettes,’ this in a snow storm and this from a man who didn’t smoke.  So I ran to the kitchen in our Baxter Family tenement in Schenectady, New York to tell my mother, ‘Daddy car, Daddy car.’  Del Sr. walked out into a blizzard, scraped the snow and ice off our family’s 1946 Plymouth sedan and drove away, forever.”  “Daddy car” should have been “Daddy gone.”

That snowy moment established the importance of cars in the mind of young Del Baxter.  The moment manifested itself as an eccentric making cars out of scrap material in a remote location.  He continues to whittle and shape iconic tributes to Cars he will never own and could never afford on his annual income of $1,175, from redeeming beer and soda cans.

Cars for Del Baxter are deeply felt, admired as industrial design and inspirational tools that could one day take him to a better place.