This is a success story, of sorts. As you may have noticed, they are a little unusual at the moment. I am plotting my release from post surgical time at the rehab center down in Culpeper, hoping to be back with the crowd at Refuge Farm next week. Healing seems to be proceeding each day, and the heat wave has broken into a delightful day tinged with an old surreal architectural style. I have mentioned it before, the Space-Age “Googie” look, and it has survived. There was uncertainty about that, since Bob Peck’s Chevy dealership in Arlington had all the cars disappear on weekend and the chain link fence was erected around the properly.

The Peck Dealership was a local legend. Bob started out down in the Clarendon neighborhood back in 1939, the same year the Buckingham Garden Apartment project started and just after the streetcar lines shut down.

A lot of people from the neighborhood bought their cars from Bob. He moved out to the Glebe Road location after the war, and added the dramatic new space-aged façade in 1964.

It was intended to make a statement about Arlington and the future, and he engaged architect Anthony Musolleno to build the structure in the “Googie” manner, a style that had swept the nation.

The term for the kidney-shaped, glass-walled architecture style was already starting to seem kitchy to the pros, but regular people loved it. Drive-ins and motels all across the country had adopted the style with a vengence, and a term was needed to describe restaurants that looked like space-ships.

Googie’s Coffee Shop on the Sunset Strip in LA is the place that gave us the name.

It opened in 1949, and was not the first of the breed. A man named John Lautner evolved the look, starting with three Coffee Dan’s shops in LA during the war years. People were working multiple shifts in the aircraft plants and needed their caffeine, just as we need our Starbucks today.

Lautner’s style was pronounced by the time Mr. Googie approached him for something with a touch of the surreal. He liked the vaulted roof-lines, bold glass and futuristic angles for his building.

Professor Douglas Haskell of Yale was the man who associated the coffee shop with the genre: Googie Architecture. He had been driving down with a photographer buddy at the beginning of the Fifties. He stopped to gawk at the place, and wrote about it in House and Home Magazine.

“Googie” soon became a term of derision for serious architects. But we all remember it. Almost all the bowling alleys of the 1950s were Googie-influenced, and there were upswept roofs, domes and boomerang shapes everywhere.

Googie was about the future. It was the space age.

What Bob Peck commissioned was a remarkable thing, even for construction from the period when cars had fins like jets. His show room resembled a flying saucer hovering over plate glass, the edges rolled over with a pastry wheel.

Tony Mussoleno got a fee for the design, but for erecting it he got something else. Two new Corvettes, a ’64 and a ’65 when the work was done.

Around the Jetson’s futuristic diamond motif canopy, letters spelled out B-O-B-P-E-C-K above the saucer and C-H-E-V-R-O-L-E-T below on colored plastic inserts.

In the day, Bob moved more than 2,700 cars a year off that lot, and his property became one of the most recognized in the County. His fame increased and he juggled lacrosse balls on his TV commercials. He was elected to the school board and the county council, and chaired them both.

The Soviet news agency Tass once ran a picture of the dealership as an icon of capitalism, which is pretty high tribute.

Bob stayed in the business until he was almost eighty, and lived until he was 84. My pal Mac traveled in exclusive circles, based on his government job, and knew him when he could not run the business any more. Bob became afflicted with dementia of the Alzheimer’s type.

He loved the Optimist Club luncheons at the Washington Golf and Country Club, which anchors the social scene in North Arlington. His wife would deliver him there, where he’d take a table at the edge of the room and snooze.

His son Don finally couldn’t resist the price he was offered for the property by the JPG group, one of the anonymous development concerns. The price for the corner lot amounted to eleven million dollars an acre. JPG is going to develop the crap out of the corner, just as soon as the coming recession is over.

I had hoped they might keep the weird showroom and incorporate it into whatever big is going to come next as a historical quotation on old Arlington. The developer made noises about it, but you know as well as I do what is going to happen. When it is gone, Googie will disappear from Arlington.

Bob would never have put up with it. He cared about his customers, and got a lot of repeat business from Big Pink.

One of the very best customers was a guy named Roy, who lived up on the seventh floor. He had the same problem Bob did, only earlier. I don’t know many of the folks up there, or don’t yet, since I think it is my fate to live on all the floors before I depart this mortal coil. I certainly didn’t meet Roy, though people still talk about him.

He had been a big-time businessman, a mover and shaker, and had lived in Big Pink since before it went condo. He used to travel a lot, a real high-roller, and knew everyone. As the years passed, though, he seemed to know fewer and fewer and by the time he left the building in the ambulance with lights but no siren, he knew no one at all.

The long decline had its moments. He would often misplace his car in the lot below his seventh floor place. His approach was not to wander the lot looking for it, but rather to take a cab over to Bob Peck and buy another car.

Bob was happy to oblige. At one point Roy had at least three new cars, haphazardly parked around the sprawling campus, which made at least one of them easy to find at any given time. Bob also cut Roy a deal on the trade-ins, since there were so many of them, and all came with low, low miles.

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