“I got to looking at the car, and it’s hard to explain, but I walked up to it and it was almost like your old dog or horse that you haven’t seen in a long time and they know who you are. I know it sounds strange, but it was like it was talking to me,” he says, with emotion in his voice. “This was my car.”

Adding to the sentiment of the moment, Jones says the title to the car that he’d gotten in ’78 that he simply signed and handed over to Halley had endured through the three different owners without anyone turning it back in. Once Jones was able to strike a deal to buy the car back — it hadn’t been for sale, but Haga was able to convince the owner to part with it — he received the title that he says “still had my signature on it, with my parents address on it from when I bought it in 1978. That meant a lot to me to see that. It was cool.”

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The Camaro before and after being stripped down to the bare shell for its revitalization.
Haga negotiated the deal, and more than thirty years after he parted with it, Jones’ Camaro — the one that could be easily credited for his success in business — was back home, where he never really knew it belonged until now.

Jones says it took a few weeks of hand-wringing to get the owner to sell the car, and says “when they brought it back and put the trailer door down, it was pretty cool to see.”