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Matchbox replicates Suffern's DARE police car
Already a Hit among
Children, the 1978 Corvette could bring fame to Suffern
AMY TAXIN - The
Journal News
- Feb 2000
The racy yellow
car known to Suffern and Montebello elementary schools children
could soon become a favorite nationwide.
The Suffern
Police Department’s DARE car, a 1978 Corvette with fiery purple
flames and the village’s name stamped on its hood, will soon be sold
as a Matchbox miniature in stores across the country, the prize in a
national contest for car design.
A photo of a
car, which Suffern DARE Officer Clarke Osborn takes on his visits to
area elementary schools, was placed last August on Matchbox’s Web
site, where children voted for their favorites.
The winners of
Mattel Inc.’s contest will be made into replicas 64 times
smaller then the cars’ actual size and sold in toy stores starting
in December.
The car already
a hit among students, is appreciated even more now for the fame it
could bring to the village.
“It’s neat
knowing a little town like this is going to be so widely known.”
Said Brittney Bahlman, a seventh grader at Sacred Heart School.
Jessica
Szorentini, 9, was impressed by how much Suffern’s car stood out
from its nearly 25 competitors on the Web site. Logging on to vote
made her realize, “it was better. It was the greatest.”
The brightly
painted DARE car started out as a beat-up red and gray Corvette
seized in driving-while-intoxicated arrest in 1993. When Suffern
police discovered the car had been stolen from a New Jersey car
dealership soon after it was made 15 years earlier, it impounded the
car and adopted it, said Craig Long, a police department spokesman.
The car was then
painted black with red lettering until a year ago when
Frank’s Auto Body in Hillburn
decided it could use a “spruce up.”
“The whole
purpose of the car is to get the kids’ eye and the kids’ attention
that police are good,” said Frank Chicherchia, the auto shop owner
who designed the glittering flames and orange underside to the car’s
exterior. “So, we came up with the idea and did it. I had no idea
I would get national attention. We did it for the kids.”
Fine Line Signs
of Suffern donated the lettering on the car, and Chicherchia
maintains the car for free. |
