Still truckin’: Meet the Boise-area residents repairing and riding in vintage pickups
Dan Leighty’s foray into restoring vintage pickup trucks was a redemption story of sorts.
Growing up on a small farm in Southern California, he learned how to tinker with trucks “out of necessity,” he said. The vehicles he was allowed to drive were his parents’ used trucks, if he could repair them.
He bought his own truck when he was 20 and tried to turn it into a hot rod — and “pretty much ruined it” in the process. Years later, he decided to try again. “I was gonna atone for that, and I was going to get an old truck and just fix it up really nicely,” he told the Idaho Statesman.
He got about halfway through the project and managed to get the truck to drive “just like a brand-new truck of that era.”
And that was “terrible,” he said. He realized that what he really wanted was a hot rod after all. “So I tore it all down again.”
He has continued to repair and re-sell cars and trucks in the years since, and claims he’s gotten the hot-rod bug out of his system, with plans for future projects that will be “very sedate.”
That said, when he drives his current truck, a 1957 Ford F-100, it’s hard to resist taking advantage of its acceleration and speed, he said.
“It’s really my second adolescence,” he said. “It’s hard to keep my foot out of it. It really goes.”
Vintage car club offers community, nostalgia
Every time Kathi and Butch Schaffeld stop at a gas station to fill up their 1963 Chevy Side Step, somebody nearby stops to say, “Oh, I learned to drive in a truck just like that,” Kathi told the Statesman.
It’s very common for people to gravitate to the cars they grew up with, Butch added. Growing up in Ontario, Oregon, his first truck was a family vehicle that had fallen into disrepair.
“ ‘See that way out in the field? You can have it,’ ” he recalled hearing.
But that meant a yearslong repair process. That truck’s original seats were “bucket seats,” he recalled — that is, they were upside-down five-gallon buckets screwed onto the floor.
Butch got involved with the Boise-area Idaho Chariots, a vintage car club that gathers for car shows and other events, and hosts a weekly lunch where members talk insurance plans and trade ideas about repair schemes.
Soon after retirement, Kathi joined in, getting to know a women’s group that forms a small subset of the Chariots. They talk vintage cars, but they also meet regularly to read, eat and knit — “stitchin’ and bitchin’,” Kathi said.
Dean Hansen has worked on and off for years on a 1966 Chevy that was once an Air Force vehicle and, later, a police vehicle for the city of Cascade. He and his son share a storage space where they work in parallel on upgrading old vehicles, meeting up in the evenings if Hansen’s son needs advice on a repair.
For many vintage truck appreciators, the joy is in the restoring, with an ultimate goal to sell the vehicle and start the process over. But Hansen has no such plans.
“I’m the guy that drives the wheels off,” he said.
Upcoming vintage-car shows in Idaho
If vintage cars and trucks get you revved up, you’ll be glad to know that Idaho’s vintage-car show season is just getting started.
To name just a few: The Jefitos 6th Annual Car Show is scheduled for May 24 at Expo Idaho. July brings Rigby Hot Classic Nights. The Idaho Urologic Institute hosts a charity car show in Meridian on Sept. 13.
This story was originally published May 3, 2025 at 4:00 AM.
