Few colors show class like...
Few colors show class like Teal Turquoise. Orvil and Shirley painted their '65 to be identical to the car they had when married in 1966.
Orvil Osche is a lucky man. He has owned not one, but three beautiful '65 GTOs. How and where he found his latest, however, led to an adventure.
Each of us knows that the perfect Pontiac is out there for us, somewhere. It can be the one that got away or the one you've always dreamed of. Whatever the case, there is a place inside of us that will always be driven toward it. For 63-year-old Orvil Osche and his '65 389 Tri-Power GTO, some would say that fate brought them together.
Orvil can remember back to 1965 when he first began purchasing Pontiacs. LeMans, GTOs, a Grand Prix, and a Bonneville followed him home over the years. Despite this noteworthy list, only one stood above the rest: his '65 GTO. It was the Pontiac that had the most impact on his life-he even married his wife, Shirley, and drove away in it back in 1966.
Decades later the GTO was long gone, but once his kids graduated from college, he and Shirley began looking for another clean '65 GTO hardtop. After an exhaustive search, a white '65 with a medium blue interior turned up and Orvil jumped on the chance to own the 335-horse 389 four-barrel with its later Turbo 350 transmission. He soon converted it into a Tri-Power. "We cleaned, scraped, painted, and polished our ride until we had a show winner," says Orvil. And win they did.
They joined The Greater Pittsburgh GTO Club and hit the road, competing in local shows and national events. First, Second, and Third Place trophies began to fill the mantle. "We enjoyed doing this for several years, but I still dreamed of finding a documented '65 GTO hardtop with a 389 Tri-Power and a four-speed," he says. He knew that Shirley was going to give him an ear-ful, but he had to have it.
Around 2003, Orvil asked if he could find the GTO of his dreams so that they could restore it to look like the '65 he owned back in the day. She said, "Dear, wake up-we already own a beautiful '65 GTO. It's sitting in our garage. It's the one you wipe down every single day."
She was right, but the Pontiac wasn't right. Sure, it was indeed a gorgeous Goat, but it wasn't the one. He continued to plead his case, recalling how much he missed shifting the gears of the four-speed while racing against a friend's Chevelle, his friend Gary sitting next to him calling out the shift points as the tach climbed to redline. Then it happened. She said, "We will talk about it if such a car finds you." Orvil was overjoyed, "I took that as a green light, so I put the word out to anyone and everyone who would listen to me."
Orvil got the car together...
Orvil got the car together in such a short time before the 2007 GTOAA Nationals that he didn't even have a chance to take her for a spin. Now you can't pry him from behind the wheel!
Two years went by before he received a phone call from a friend, Dave, who owned an auto parts store near Indiana, Pennsylvania. A customer asked if he could post a '65 GTO "For Sale" notice in his window, so the first thing he did was call up Orvil and tell him the news. Shortly after, Orvil was on the phone picking the owner's brain about the Goat.
This wasn't just any ordinary GTO, either. It was a PHS-documented '65 GTO hardtop with a Tri-Power, four-speed, matching numbers, and it was sitting in a barn. The farmer had only driven his Goat twice in the past nine years, so he decided to sell it.
Orvil knew that this was his GTO. Now all he had to do was convince Shirley. "Believe it or not, it went quite well," he recalls. "She said as long as we sell the white one to make room for this one-and, of course, make it match the car we had when we got married-it was okay." Easy enough. He could already envision the Teal Turquoise GTO with a white pinstripe, Parchment interior, and beautiful spinner center-capped Hurst wheels.
In late October 2005, Orvil bought the GTO and brought it back to Saxonburg, Pennsylvania. "We started disassembly to find that it was the home of several mice," he jokes. The floors were also rotted from the car sitting on dirt for all of those years.