PROFILE
PHOTO BY TROY MEYER
Lopez grew up in Puerto Rico, but when he was a teenager, his mother, who was in the National Guard, transferred to Washington, D.C. They lived in Hybla Valley, and he graduated in 2003 from West Potomac High School.
IN FRANCONIA BY BETH LAWTON
“Cool car!” “Are you looking for models?” “Can I take a photo?” Rafael Lopez, who owns one of the most-recognized rare cars in the country, is used to the questions and comments, and he is nothing but gracious about them. “You can’t enjoy this car and be a hermit at the same time,” he said. “People will approach you.” Lopez, who lives in the Franconia area, owns a 1981 DeLorean DMC-12 — yes, the same model as the famous car featured in the Back to the Future movies.
The stainless steel body, rear-mount engine and gull-wing doors are obvious clues. “This thing is a happiness machine.,” Lopez said. “Everywhere you take it, people smile. It doesn’t matter their age, background, whether they know the name of the car or not, they know that it’s different and most of them know it’s from a movie.” In the past year, especially, younger fans have started to stare and point. The addition of the entire Back to the Future trilogy on Netflix in 2020 has introduced a new generation to the time-travel machine.
“Alexandria was really my first real U.S. home and a great place for it because you have the history and you have the diversity of people here. As a Puerto Rican, my experience of diversity was Mexicans and Dominicans — Caribbean people — and that was considered ‘foreign.’ So I came here and it was like the United Nations,” Lopez chuckled. He eventually joined the military himself and bought the car when he was 30 years old for about $32,000 from a DeLorean dealership outside of Chicago. Aside from a radio fuse going bad midtrip, the car made the 14-hour trek back to Alexandria with no issues. “I grew up with the movies and I wasn’t just fascinated with it because it was a time-machine car, but I thought when I saw it in the movies that it was such a cool car, so ahead of its time, and it just had such a futuristic look to it. As a kid, I grew up on NASA and space so that always attracted me, and the look just matched that attraction that I always had,” Lopez said.
March / April 2021 • alexandrialivingmagazine.com
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