Column: Corvette stunt at IMS sparks memories of fast cars, Vietnam and a father on Memorial Day weekend

Jerry Hogan with his 1957 Chevy truck in mid-1970s in Manteca, California near Modesto, the site of American Graffiti. (Photo by Kathy Dodd)

By Jeremy Hogan

BLOOMINGTON — May 23, 2026

This probably is not the biggest news out of Indianapolis Motor Speedway this weekend, but for readers who care about cars, horsepower, family garages and the strange emotional weather of Memorial Day, it was hard not to stop and look.

On Saturday, a Chevrolet Corvette ZR1X performed a high-speed stunt at IMS, passing inches from 186 feet of cake and blowing out 250 candles set up to mark America’s upcoming 250th anniversary. General Motors development engineer Cody Bulkley was behind the wheel as the Corvette made a 90 mph pass in an American flag-inspired livery, with design cues from Chevrolet’s Stars & Steel collection.

A custom-painted, dual-color Stars & Steel-inspired Corvette ZR1X is scheduled to lead the field to the green flag Sunday for the 110th running of the Indianapolis 500.

And yes, the car looks and sounds like ridiculous fun.

But on Memorial Day weekend, machines like that can carry a little more weight than just horsepower numbers and promotional copy. Full disclosure: my father, Jerry Hogan, had a 1957 Chevy truck when he was a kid, and it had a modified 327 Corvette engine in it. It was one of his projects.

He had been trained as a helicopter mechanic during the Vietnam War, but instead of a quiet rear-area job, he saw two combat tours. The truck was traded for a Ford Pinto while my parents were having some issues in 1980. That one still stings.

My father died in 2024.

Some fathers play catch. Some watch football. Some tell you they love you in straightforward ways. Mine didn’t always. But later, in high school, he gave me a 1985 Camaro with a V-6 and a five-speed, and I drove that car until it was basically ready to quit. It’s how I got all around and all over the country, and part of why I’m a visual journalist now.

Some of the only real bonding we had when I was a little kid happened in garages, turning wrenches, with 1960s and 1970s rock playing in the background. That garage was an oasis from a lot of the problems of 1970s California, and from the problems my father carried home from Vietnam.

He was a rough character in some ways, an alienated, very angry Vietnam veteran, a man damaged by war and then expected to come home and somehow become normal. He had dropped out of high school before Vietnam. He did not have a college degree. But he knew engines, tools, helicopters and mechanical problems. He could make things run. He later worked in construction until 2007 then we got him a VA disability rating. There is so much to this story, and a lot of it is sad.

Seeing the Corvette spinning donuts at IMS was funny in a way, because after one engine rebuild on that old ’57 Chevy, we went out and did exactly that. There are parts of that story that are probably peak Gen X. Some parents now would not approve. Maybe they would be right. But it is also true that, for some of us, the garage was where we connected with our fathers.

I can’t listen to “Racing in the Street” without getting a lump in my throat. We did just that in the late 1970s, living near Modesto, California. Sometimes I went along for the ride. It’s crazy to think about now.

My father also spent a lot of our family income on that truck, which would really piss off my mother. My father’s truck could run the quarter-mile in about 13 seconds, and in the 1970s, it would outrun most stock Corvettes. Probably not this Corvette ZR1X, though. I remember hearing my father gripe that his truck had so much torque it broke lug nuts.

I remember going with my father not only to junkyards to look for parts, but also to drag races in Stockton. He also had a ’55 Chevy wagon he was going to turn into another hot rod, but that never happened. As his PTSD got worse, the project sat. Eventually, we had to sell our house and move.

There was no help from the VA back then. We were on our own, trying to survive in the country my father supposedly fought to defend. He didn’t get anything until 2008, after me, my sister, and one of his combat pilots scrambled for him. He was going to end up homeless and/or dead, it was bad.

I personally flew to California, told him to get into my rental car, and I took him to the VA. A retired Marine helped with the claim, but it took me going to the National Archives to dig up a daily journal listing his injury, to get him his money. Uncle Sam couldn’t argue with what I dug up in their own files. In America, you are often left to fend for yourself, and your family. Many of us know this, Veterans could fill volumes with stories like that.

In the daily journal I dug up, it listed how my father got hit with a piece of a rocket. My father’s commanding officer said a few fractions of an inch, and my father would have been dead. It happened while my father was in a firefight while getting some troops out of a bad situation. He was shooting a stripped down machine gun from the helicopter at a member of the NVA who was shooting at him, when hit got hit.

He would say, there is nothing wrong with me, I have all my arms, and legs. Finally, even my father understood that some injuries from war are unseen.

So, America is complicated for a lot of us.

We still have my father’s photo albums from Vietnam. Sometimes they were left out when I was a kid. I remember photographs of crashed helicopters, soldiers flashing peace signs, my father with guns, and young men trying to survive a war that would follow many of them home. Some of the photos are here.

One of those men in the photos was John Gruber, one of my father’s buddies from Vietnam. My father had not seen him since the war. Later, we found his name on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall. Gruber was killed a few months after my father left Nam.

In 2012, after I had done some volunteer work connected to the Vietnam War commemoration, my father and I were invited to Washington, D.C., for a ceremony at the wall. We found John Gruber’s name and paid our respects.

Jerry Hogan looking up John Gruber’s name in 2012. (Photo by Jeremy Hogan)

https://www.virtualwall.org/dg/GruberJH01a.htm

That’s John Gruber second from left, the person in the background in the helicopter, that’s Jerry Hogan, my father. Photographer Unknow

It is hard to explain what Memorial Day means when war did so many bad things to someone you loved. It is grief, anger, patriotism, skepticism, memory and love all mixed together. It is the smell of oil in a garage. It is rock music on the radio. It is a father who could rebuild an engine but could not rebuild the part of himself Vietnam broke.

We worked on our relationship later on, going to military reunions, but it was hard. We were very different people. I went to college and got to do things he couldn’t have dreamed of doing. When I got a photo published once in The New York Times, I heard he took it to work and showed it to everybody.

There was a time I broke down, and he would not come help me at night because of his PTSD. But he showed up the next morning, at the break of dawn, and fixed my Camaro on the side of the road. I can’t remember when, in reality, he didn’t have my back to the best of his ability. And often, we bonded over cars.

So, yes, Chevrolet brought a Corvette to IMS and blew out 250 candles for America’s milestone anniversary. It was a corporate stunt. It was also a very American image: speed, noise, machinery, spectacle, flags, horsepower and memory.

And as always, spinning burnouts in a Corvette is fun stuff.

My father had a lot of different really fast cars over the years. I can only imagine what he’d think of this Corvette.

But without my father around, Memorial Day lands heavier now. The cars are still beautiful. The engines still roar. The garage memories still matter. And somewhere in all of that, for some of us, is America.

The author, Jeremy Hogan, and his father, while the family was living off the grid in California after dropping out of society in 1980. Photo by Kathy Dodd

Jerry Hogan, Door gunner/Crew Chief, Bravo Troop, 1/9th CAV, around November 1969. Photographer unknown.

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