NORTH READING — Dozens of Corvettes rumbled into the parking lot at Teresa’s Prime Steakhouse on Tuesday night, as they do on a weekly basis for the North Shore Corvette Club’s meetings.
And, this Tuesday marked a special occasion for the club — its 60th anniversary. To mark the occasion, Corvettes of all shapes and sizes flooded the parking lot — including a red 1961 model, a 1964 coupe, and a 1968 Stingray, which sat alongside newer models. During the cruise night, a Crowd Favorite Corvette trophy was given to the most popular car of the bunch, Rick Yaffi’s 1958 convertible.
“We are proud to be one of the largest and oldest Corvette clubs still together,” said the club’s president, Frank Puccia, of Saugus.
Puccia noted that the club’s membership exceeds 180 people.
The club, which meets at Teresa’s each Tuesday night from May to the end of September, is more than an opportunity to show off cool cars, Puccia explained.
In fact, the club is a nonprofit and charitable organization that donates money each year to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Edith Nourse Rogers Memorial Veterans Hospital in Bedford, and Toys for Tots.
Founded in 1963, the North Shore Corvette Club actually began well before then as an informal collective that met at the Adventure Car Hop on Route 1. That group was sometimes referred to as the Route 1 Racing Association, in part because of its propensity for drag racing along the highway, which was lined with traffic lights that served as markers for quarter-mile races.
At the time, Puccia said, there was much talk about how the Corvette had replaced the building of “lightweight ‘hot rod’ powerhouses” from old coupes and pickup trucks from the ‘30s and ‘40s.
“Why spend all that time and money when you could buy a ‘powerhouse’ already completed and it looked really good?” he said.
Those conversations led to the birth of the Corvette club. It drew two types of Corvette owners — the older group from the Adventure Car Hop from the late ’50s and early ’60s, and a second, younger generation from both the Car Hop and other meeting places.
The first meetings were held at Saltz Chevrolet in Salem, the first club’s first sponsor.
“Their beginnings were humble, but their numbers grew,” Puccia said.
And so, as the club expanded, a new venue was needed, and the Corvettes rode back to Route 1, settling into Prince Pizza. It met there for years before moving to Sylvan Street Grille in Peabody in 2007 and eventually its current meeting place, Teresa’s, in 2021.
The club is one of New England’s “largest and active Corvette clubs,” and hosts the only Corvette-exclusive cruise night in the region, according to Puccia.
“NSCM is a club of many members working towards a set of common goals: To cultivate new friendships and have fun through exciting activities for all members and their families,” he said. “We welcome all to share their love for the Corvette and the culture it has created.”
