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My name is Andreas Stevens. My professional name is Greyboy and I'm a DJ and a music producer.
I'm from San Diego and I remember like 15 years ago seeing a van down there that was
all original, it had a mural on the side with like a wave breaking and it said "Get down
tonight." And it had portholes, cool portholes and side pipes, and I remember thinking,
I think that was the first time I was like, man I remember those when I was a kid and
I thought like I want to get one of those one day. Those are awesome, you know?
Because of my other interest in vans I collect old magazines about vans from the 70's
and so in a number of those there's articles about the Brubaker Box. When you see the articles,
you just think, oh, that's a really cool car that I'll never see, you know, or own. It
was really my friend Joe, who is a fellow van enthusiast so one day he texted me a link
and it was a link to the Brubaker Box that I ended up with for sale. It one was on the
South New Jersey Craigslist. Yeah, so then when it popped up I just thought, okay, this
is you know, this is my chance, I'm going to jump at it. Just the shape of it, really,
you know, the shape, and even the big wood bumpers and the dual tone, you know, and then
obviously the fiberglass construction and the fact that it was designed and produced
in Southern California, so all those things together really peaked my interest.
So it was complete but just severely neglected. Basically, you know, it got here and because
of the fiberglass body the body was all good but everything metal that was underneath the
body was pretty much toast, so I just pulled the body and basically replaced every component
of the pan and chassis. So basically it has been like six months and I was pretty obsessive
about it, like getting it done.
My name is Mike Hansen. I've been involved years past with a company called Automecca.
We got involved in what was called the Brubaker Sports Van, or the Brubaker Box to be more
realistic, and I told Andreas when I spoke to him that I thought we maybe made 22 to
25.
My dad always had cool cars and was always doing fun things with dune buggies, off-road
racing with my brothers and when he got involved with the sports van all my friends thought
they were so cool, and he would bring ... drive one home and they all would want to look at
it and climb inside. And he was just known as pretty much the cool dad. When we'd drive
around we'd peek out the windows and we could see that everybody was looking and you could
tell people were kind of pointing and talking and you knew they were saying, like "What
is that?" They'd never seen anything like that before. So, it was pretty fun to be the
center of attention like that.
Can you imagine the reaction people got with that car, a guy setting one of those up? We
had some really good times. People would just fall all over themselves to come see what
it was. Since then I've watched it kind of happen and then fade into what I thought was
just history, and in recent times I've discovered there's a lot of interest. I think the Internet
and the Facebook phenomenon has brought that into possibility.
Once again, when I look at it now, I just never thought I would have a Brubaker Box,
you know. It gets a lot of reaction, you know, definitely more than any car I've ever owned
and, I don't know what it is, I mean, I do know what it ... it's just so unusual, you
know. I mean, I try to put myself in like turn around like if I saw that on the road
what would I think? And I'm sure I'd just be like, "Whoa, what is that?"