A terminally-ill Yellowknife man has turned to a renowned Nova Scotia auto body shop to make his dream of passing a special truck onto his son come true.
Yvan Brien retired and sold his own heavy truck and repair shop in Yellowknife last fall. A month later, he fell ill while vacationing in Mexico.
“We flew into Phoenix, Arizona, went to the Mayo Clinic, had a huge surgery to remove a glioblastoma tumour, which was diagnosed in that 48 hours,” says Yvan.
Facing a terminal cancer diagnosis, Yvan decided he wanted to do something special for his son by leaving him his truck – a red 1965 Chevrolet.
Yvan says he initially purchased the truck for his wife, although she admits she doesn’t quite buy her husband’s story.
“It’s a ’65 and the wife was born in ’65,” explains Yvan. “I thought I was buying her a truck, but she wasn’t too interested.”
“That’s the premise on getting the truck … but I knew right off the bat, that’s not my truck, that’s Yvan’s,” Aren Decker-Brien says with a smile.
Yvan has turned to Curtis Customs in Elmsdale, N.S. to complete a radical rebuild of the truck.
Owner Curtis MacLean has spent the last several days stripping the truck down to its nuts and bolts, after it made the journey all the way from the Northwest Territories.
“And catalogued and organized all the pieces that came off on the table, what had to be stripped … most of the truck, 90 per cent of it, was sandblasted to bare metal, immediately into the body shop on Monday, and prepped and ready for paint,” says MacLean.
Such a project would typically take MacLean and his team a year to complete, but because it’s such a unique case, they’re aiming to finish the job in 30 days.
“He needs to see the project through to completion, restored, framed up the way he dreamt of it, to pass it on to his son,” says MacLean, who met the Brien family for the first time at his shop on Tuesday.
“Well, I totally appreciate it, and I wasn’t expecting that,” says Yvan of the tight timeline. “My boy, he’s not mechanically inclined, so he needs to walk in and turn the key, and hopefully that truck’s good for 50 more years.”
“It’s something that I’ll always have with him and memories that we’ll have riding this thing together,” says 21-year-old Matt Brien. “It’s something I’m never going to get rid of or sell, so it will be a piece that always stays with me.”
If all goes as planned, the Brien family plans to drive the revamped truck to their summer home near Shelburne in the spring.
With files from CTV Atlantic's Yvan Brien
