Survivor Class Keeps Local Memories Alive at Bellefonte Cruise

This story originally appeared in The Centre County Gazette’s Bellefonte Cruise Guide.

BELLEFONTE — For a few hours each year, the streets of Bellefonte stop acting like streets.

They become memory lanes.

Chrome shines beneath the courthouse lights. Old engines rumble through town like ghosts with gasoline in their veins. Men and women who once spent Friday nights “riding the block” suddenly find themselves standing beside the same cars they cruised in more than half a century ago.

And somewhere near the Brockerhoff House, usually parked together beneath handmade signage, sits one of the most heartfelt traditions of the Bellefonte Cruise: the Survivor Class.

“These are the Bellefonte or local area cars,” said Darrell Furfaro, who helped organize the group beginning around 2017. “It was our social hour or social evening to get out with friends and meet and all the things young people would do back then. Meet the girls, drive loud, fast cars.”

Furfaro remembers the real cruising days of Bellefonte vividly. A 1973 graduate, he was one of the teenagers looping through town during the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s before the borough eventually cracked down on the congestion.

“If you wanted to go from down at the bridge on High Street up to the courthouse, it could take you a half an hour because of traffic being so stopped up,” he said. “It was that scene straight out of American Graffiti.”

Years later, local residents helped revive those memories through what became the Bellefonte Cruise. But Furfaro realized something was missing.

“We’ve never once recognized the people that used to ride the block and gave us the reason to have an event at all,” he said.

So the Survivor Class was born.

Unlike traditional car show entries, the Survivor Class is built around local history. These are the cars — and owners — who were part of Bellefonte’s original cruising culture decades ago. Some remain with their original owners. Others have been painstakingly restored by families determined to preserve a piece of local identity.

“One couple, John and Annie Fry, they’re in their 80s,” Furfaro said. “They bought their 1963 Chevy Impala way back then and they still have it today.”

The couple eventually moved back to Bellefonte after years in California, bringing the convertible with them.

“They used to ride the block when they were young,” Furfaro said. “A young married couple 60 some years ago.”

Other stories carry the mythology of small-town street racing lore.

Furfaro recalled a green 1955 Chevrolet once considered one of the fastest cars in Bellefonte.

“That car was just one of the most respected cars on the street,” he said.

Another local legend, a 1957 Chevrolet owned by Greg Davis, became part of a rivalry many locals still remember.

“I think all of us growing up were hoping that one night that would happen when a street race between those cars would occur,” Furfaro said with a laugh. “One thing led to another over time and that race never happened.”

But perhaps the most meaningful stories aren’t about horsepower.

They’re about time.

About fathers and sons.

About refusing to let something meaningful disappear.

Furfaro and his son, Dion, spent 13 years restoring their Mustang Mach 1 together after Dion discovered the car hidden beneath a tarp in the family garage at age 7.

“He got in and sat down in the driver’s seat,” Furfaro recalled. “He couldn’t even see over the steering wheel. He was just sitting there, a little boy in a car, and he’s going, ‘Oh wow.’”

That night, the restoration began with something simple: removing the horns from the car and carefully organizing the parts into labeled plastic bags.

“We had to make a good plan to do this right or we would regret the finish,” Furfaro said.

The project became more than restoring metal.

“It’s irreplaceable,” he said of the bonding experience. “We learned so much about each other during that process.”

Today, Dion serves as treasurer for the Bellefonte Cruise committee and helped bring television personality Dennis Gage to the event in recent years.

The Survivor Class itself has become something of a rolling oral history exhibit. It’s one where visitors can walk up and hear stories directly from the people who lived them.

“There are people, as I said, that not only owned those cars way back in the day, but they can talk about the things they’ve done to them and how they’ve just labored to keep them the way they were in that time period,” Furfaro said.

For many visitors, the biggest surprise is simple.

“You’ve had this car all these years?” Furfaro said people often ask.

In an era when many vehicles are traded in every few years, the Survivor Class represents something increasingly rare: permanence.

“These people refused to part with the cars,” he said. “And they still have them over all this time.”

But beneath the polished chrome and restored engines, the Survivor Class preserves something even more fragile than old steel.

Memory.

Community.

The stories that vanish if nobody asks.

“Like all things,” Furfaro said, “if you don’t ask those questions now, the day is going to come when you’re not going to be able to ask those questions.”

The Bellefonte Cruise is underway Friday, June 19, through Saturday, June 20. For schedules and details visit bellefontecruise.org.