Guinevere and Lilly
Model:
1963 Beetle
Name:
I named her after a woman I admire.
Color:
Anthracite Gray
Mileage:
30,000 original miles
Motors:
Original
Owned since:
2019
Owners:
Little old lady, my grandfather, me.
Location:
Connecticut
Favorite driving song:
I love that there’s no technology. There’s no radio. I don’t even play my iPhone when I’m in her.
Lilly was originally bought new from Pray Volkswagen, the dealer across the street from our shop by a little old lady. She drove her as a daily driver around town. My grandfather bought Lilly in 1980 and garaged her, so she stayed dormant for a few decades.
When I came home from college in 2012, I took over the marketing of the business and I wanted it to specialize in Volkswagens. My grandfather said no—he didn’t want to use the internet to market the business. Then he passed away in 2018. Cancer took him in a few weeks. One of the last things he said to me was “Take care of my family, take care of the boys at the shop, take care of the business.” He never let me have a voicemail at the shop. So three days after he died, I got voicemail. I said sorry to his spirit, wherever it is, but I don’t think I can run a business without voicemail.
If I take her into town, I plan an extra half hour with my errands because I know everyone’s going to stop me with a Volkswagen story.
These cars are really like part of the family—people call and say they need their annual checkup. It’s their little car’s physical.
At that point it was solidified that I was fifth generation—we weren’t closing the shop after my grandfather passed, we were to keep going. One day my dad said, “You are a fifth-generation VW repair shop owner, you have all these vintage cars, you need to use them or they’re not going to work. They need to be loved.” In the spring of 2019, we took Lilly out of storage. She ran right away. We gave her a fresh tune-up and a nice detail.
I wasn’t driving a lot back then. I had been in a car accident in 2014, and I had very bad PTSD. I didn’t like being in cars, I didn’t want to be in cars. I had a back procedure and hip surgery. Then I started driving Lilly. There’s no radio. There are no distractions. I felt that people were so aware of me on the road that almost all of my driving anxiety melted away.
I’ll go out in the backcountry and drive in quiet. She’s just like her own little meditation. It’s peaceful. It’s peaceful to turn off the news. It’s peaceful to not hear the cell phone dinging, and then you just hear that little blurrp-blurrp—that little Volkswagen engine—and I’m calm.
​
I named her Lilly after a woman I admire. The Prays have the Malcolm Pray Achievement Center that includes two garages and a car collection and helps underprivileged kids and school groups. I attended a talk there after my grandfather died, and I heard Malcolm Pray’s daughter Lilly speak about being a woman in the automotive world. She was very inspiring. After hearing her talk, I had so much fight, I had so much hope, and I named my car Lilly when we took her out of storage.
​We celebrated our hundredth year last year. My great-great-aunt Emily started this business with her two brothers. Those are the original Freccia brothers. Their parents came over from Italy and built the building. We started out painting horse-drawn carriages (and monogramming them), and we were a dealer for cars back in the day too. Malcolm Pray’s dealership was across the street, and that’s how we got into Volkswagens. Our company did all the repairs in the sixties. Then in 2012, my husband, Dave, came on board as the mechanic. He was trained by my grandfather. People say that Dave is probably one of the best air-cooled mechanics around.
Before Dave came on, it was a seasonal business. We started taking in more Volkswagens and trying to thin the other stuff out. As time went on, I built a website with our phone number and email. We built little by little. Then I got on Instagram, and by 2017 we were 95 percent air-cooled: Corvairs, Porsches, Volkswagens. We will still change a battery for the little old ladies that we’ve worked with forever.
My great-great-aunt Emily ran the business while her brothers worked in the factories during the war, so I never really questioned owning a business or what women could do. I wanted to own my own business. I remember saying, “I’m the first girl to go to college and graduate” and my dad’s like, “No you aren’t. Your great-great-aunt Emily went to Columbia.” I was like, “Oh no one ever told me that.” A lot of times people will talk to me online. Then they’ll come into the shop and they’ll shake my husband’s hand and say “We’ve been chatting on Instagram,” and he’s like, “That’s my wife.”
​
Dave and I have turned the business around, and now we have a wait list of over two hundred people. I went to school for photography and I worked in marketing, so everything I learned there I have put back into the business—it worked.
Lilly is all original except for the fenders that the little old lady banged up. So those have been fixed and repainted. But other than that, everything’s all original.
Then, a year later, I started taking Lilly the car to car shows and would run into Lilly the person. We became very good friends, and she’s basically become my life mentor in every aspect of my life. I finally had to tell her “Oh, just so you know, I named my car Lilly after you before we were friends.” Now it’s a running joke around the car people. “Is it Lilly the person or Lilly the car? Will we see both of them this weekend?” I will start telling stories, like “Oh, me and Lilly were in Brewster by the apple orchard,” and people ask, “You and the car or you and the person?”
In 2021, I drove her to my first show by myself, the Turtle Invitational. It was right by Pound Ridge, and I had no cell phone service. There were supercars shipped in from all over—really, really expensive cars. Me and Lilly are showing, it’s the end of the day, and someone comes up to me and they say, “Oh, you just placed Best German. We need you and the car on stage.” I said, “No I didn’t. There are like multimillion-dollar cars here. I didn’t win.” They said, “Yeah, you placed Best German.” I had to drive this car up to a podium and talk into a microphone while sitting in the car while in first. I thought, If I can talk to two hundred people and get over this, I can drive anywhere.
​
When I placed at the Turtle, I didn’t call my dad or my husband, because I thought if I call them, they’re gonna think I broke down, they’re gonna come looking for me. So I waited until I got home, and I took all these pictures in front of the garage with my little Turtle trophy. They asked, “Who’d you borrow it from?” I said, “No, we won. We did better than the supercars!”
​Then Covid happened. We thought it was going to kill us. The quarantine . . . I was ready to say goodbye to the business. But we saw more customers than we’ve ever seen before.
Car values shot up like crazy. Bugs shot up like crazy. We stayed open because we were considered essential workers and were getting calls from all over the country. We got new customers, we saw customers my dad hadn’t seen in decades. They were coming out of the woodwork. The thought was If the world is ending, I’m gonna enjoy life and get my Bug on the road again. We had people that weren’t commuting and had extra time and extra money to put into these cars. We had people that weren’t traveling for work anymore and thought Oh, I’ve seen my Bug sitting in my garage for twenty years—it’s time to get it out. We had small businesses that ended up going mobile in their Buses. We would come to work, and there would be Volkswagens all over the lot with love notes and wish lists—please fix me. It was wild. I went to art school, and I would never buy a vintage oil painting and just ship it to a restoration place without calling them first, but people were just shipping cars to us.
Two years ago, we had a really bad flood here and there was a Bug that was under nine feet of water, a convertible. It belonged to a woman who had got it from her mother and driven it to her wedding. It was in brackish water, which is really, really bad. It was the height of our season, and we literally stopped all work, brought in this car, and took apart every single piece, sprayed it down, and put it all together. We had a very little window to save that car or that lady would have been devastated. People will do anything for these cars.
​
Another lady was battling breast cancer, and she bought a Bus to travel cross-country. I stopped all other business to get her Bus done. I just try to put good out into the world.
