OUT & ABOUT
Chip Fudge in his garage with the non-racing part of the collection.
The Value of Older Things Chip Fudge buys relics and puts them back together BY GREG HORTON PHOTO BY STEVE SISNEY
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AUGUST 2021
ome of his earliest and best memories are of exploring junk shops and antique stores – highbrow and low – with his grandmother. “She taught me the value of craftsmanship, the love of older things,” said Chip Fudge. It’s “John” officially, but to everyone who knows him, he’s “Chip.” An Oklahoma City entrepreneur, Fudge was born in Dallas, but his father’s job brought him north to the city he now calls home. “I dropped out of Putnam City High School in 1975 to join the ‘all volunteer’ army, as it was known then,” he says. Fudge didn’t take to military service, so he got out, got his GED and headed for Oklahoma State University, taking a pre-law track with a minor in philosophy. Before all that, though, he had a paper route.
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At 13, to facilitate that first job, he got a motorcycle; it was the beginning of a life-long romance. He loved taking things apart and – thankfully from his mother’s perspective – putting them back together again. (Not all children are built that way.) In high school, he and a buddy bought a 1958 Chevy, fixed it and sold it for $250. “I thought I’d killed the fatted calf,” Fudge said. The Bible reference comes out without hesitation, just another phrase in the mind of a furiously curious quester, tinkerer and learner who is earnest without being preachy. “The idea that I’d just made $250 doing something I enjoyed was worth celebrating.” Two years ago, he sold another car, a 1956 Lister-Maserati, for $1.1 million. It’s an interesting way to measure the trajectory of a life; possibly informative, incontrovertibly a milestone.
