Opposite Lock.(Corvette)(Brief Article)

It was easy, during a recent staff meeting, to dismiss the assertion by a young devil's advocate that ``Corvette is irrelevant.'' After I'd been to Bowling Green, Kentucky, the last weekend in June, though, it wasn't so easy. The Corvette guys are gray. Nearly all of 'em. Even the ones who aren't guys.

There was no Tod Stiles evident among the owners of the Corvettes that gathered at the National Corvette Museum to celebrate the car's 49th birthday and kickoff to a yearlong Corvette-fest. Stiles needs explaining to the people who should be his modern equivalents. Martin Milner played Tod on a TV show called Route 66, about a 20-something fellow who inherited a bundle and a car from his dad. Even in the 1960s, a Corvette was a stretch for a young man's budget and the TV writers needed to explain where he got such a neat set of wheels as a 1960 Corvette and the time to wander the country in it with his pal Buzz. But that was Corvette's image-youthful adventure.

The main event this June was Motorama, one car from each model year that drove from the original factory in Flint, Michigan, to Bowling Green. That there were no young owners among these 50 cars wasn't surprising-most have older cars, and are lifetime members of the museum, which is a $1,000 ticket.

But those who drove their Corvettes in to watch were predominantly gray, too. Today's Corvette starts at $42,000 and the Z06 is a $50,000 car. That's a long reach for a young person's budget. They'd make that ...