A few weeks before he died, and against his doctor’s orders, Rod Phelps took a drive.
It wasn’t far. Just across the Sam’s Club parking lot. But to those who knew him — and most of Lincoln’s car community knew Phelps, and they knew him as Mr. Rod — it was fitting. And a little frightening.
“It was awesome,” said longtime friend Boyd Ready. “But it was scary.”
A stroke had pulled Phelps out of the driver’s seat more than a year earlier. But as the pandemic seemed to ease earlier this summer, his friends would pick him up from his assisted-living center to take him to car shows.
In June, one of them drove him and his wheelchair to the Midwest Rollers show in Phelps’ own flat black ’29 Ford Roadster.
A little bit later, Ready heard the Ford roar to life.
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“No one had been paying too much attention to Rod,” Ready said. “Next thing, I look up, and he’s in the driver’s seat.”
Phelps, a longtime former firefighter, rumbled across the lot to greet a crew from Lincoln Fire and Rescue.
And then the 81-year-old drove back.
“That was his final drive. And it was pretty impressive.”
* * *
The Rebels will be there, joined by the Nifty Fifties Fords.
So will the Kingsmen, the Corvette owners, the Midwest Rollers and members of other Lincoln car clubs.
Maybe 150 cars — maybe more — will spend much of Monday afternoon cruising and gathering, staging a series of popup car shows to pay tribute to Phelps, who spent decades galvanizing and organizing Lincoln’s classic and custom car community before his death Aug. 3.
“He connected everybody,” Ready said. “He called himself Mr. Rod, but I called him Mr. Connecting Rod.”
Phelps helped start the Roadrunners car club as a Lincoln High student in the 1950s, said his daughter, Jenny Humphrey. And he never let up. He was active in the Nomads, the Nifty Fifties, the Rebels, the Nebraska Rod and Custom Association, the Eastern Nebraska Western Iowa Car Council.
When some of the original members of the Rebels — which had formed in the ’50s and dissolved in the ’60s — jump-started the group in 1996, Phelps helped with its resurrection and served as its coordinator for several years.
“He was always active,” said Jim McNeil, its coordinator. “He would line up places to go on weekends, and we’d all get behind and he’d be leading us on.”
Later, he helped launch Sonic cruise nights, which became Culver’s cruise nights, which welcomed all car-lovers.
“Mr. Rod’s always been a gentleman that helped everyone out, no matter what. He’s always brought people together,” said Todd Francisco of the Midwest Rollers, who met Phelps at a Culver’s cruise night a decade ago. “He’s always out there looking for that person who doesn’t belong or fit, and then he makes you fit.”
Ready met Phelps more than 20 years ago, when they were both area representatives for the Nebraska Rod and Custom Association. At the time, Ready lived south of Kearney, but when he moved to Lincoln in 2004, Phelps took him in.
“Rod was always making friends and putting groups together,” he said. “He’d introduce you to people and make sure you got together.”
He’d make sure they got along, too, Boyd said. “He kept us from fighting. He always said, ‘No religion, no politics at our deals.’ It really worked well.”
It wasn’t unusual for his friend to call to say he was gathering a group for a dinner run up to Columbus, Ready said. They never drove the same route twice, and Phelps was usually at the front.
“Driving was the whole deal. He used to have a saying: ‘Trailers are for boats.’ He never trailered his cars unless they were disabled.”
Phelps was an automotive ecumenical. He died owning several Fords — the ’29, a ’34 sedan and a ’40 coupe. But he wasn’t a Ford or Chevy owner; he was a Ford and Chevy owner. Humphrey remembers her childhood driveway near 40th and Mohawk streets stacked with several ’57 Bel Airs.
“He would go through phases,” she said.
He favored a 1949 Chevy pickup he’d found in a field nearly 20 years ago, an ash sapling growing through the corner of its front bumper. He cut it free from the ground and sawed off the top, but kept a section of stump lodged against the steel.
He also kept the patina, but gave it a new drive train.
“My dad always liked a conversation piece, and that was quite a conversation piece,” Humphrey said. “It looks like it just drove out of a field, and then you open the hood and it’s all nice in there.”
He built it for his wife and called it Suzy’s Truck. Together, they’d owned an antique store in University Place — Antiques and Flowers by Rod and Suzy — and later moved it downtown.
After Phelps retired from the fire department in 1997, they traveled the country, hitting car shows in Texas and Tennessee, Ohio and Colorado.
He lost Suzy in late 2018. He suffered a stroke two years later and, after a stay at Madonna Rehabilitation Hospital, moved to an assisted-living center at Fallbrook.
And he was told he couldn’t drive anymore.
“It was really, really tough. That was like really cutting off a limb for him,” his daughter said. “He’d driven the fire truck. He was used to driving. He loved to drive.”
* * *
On Monday, they’ll drive for him in the Mr. Rod Memorial Cruise.
They’ll gather at White Castle Roofing near 21st and Saltillo at noon, spend an hour having lunch and showing off their cars, and hit the road.
They’ll stop first at Mahoney Park in northeast Lincoln for a 30-minute car show. Then they’ll head south to Holmes Lake Park for another show, parade past the Fallbrook Assisted Living and Memory Care Center and end up at the SCCA Solo Nationals in Airpark.
Francisco, of the Midwest Rollers, helped organize the event. He had some experience.
Last year, Francisco planned a series of so-called Corona Cruises — moving car shows that kept drivers safely distanced — and they rolled past Phelps’ assisted-living center three times, when COVID-19 was keeping him inside.
But after Phelps died, Francisco wanted to do more. “I just wanted to honor him because he’s touched so many lives. You look at it as a way to give back, you know?”
All car owners are welcome, and he hopes to turn it into an annual event. Phelps would want that, Francisco said; he was always trying to get more drivers, especially younger drivers, involved in the car community.
Humphrey drove up from her home in Tennessee for the cruise. “It means the absolute world to me,” she said. “He never met a stranger. Everyone loved Mr. Rod.”
And she plans to drive in the cruise, too, behind the wheel of the ’29 Ford. The last car her dad drove.