Traditional cars fuel custom shop owner's lifelong passion

Doo-wop harmonies fill the air inside Back Street Kustoms, and 70 years of automotive history crowds the floor - a mishmash of whitewall tires, beautiful curves, sparkling chrome and pure muscle.

Custom car icon Dave Pareso turns down the volume on Lil’ Mo and the Dynaflos and gives a tour of the five vehicles parked in the garage: a 1936 Dodge truck, a 1951 Mercury, a 1957 Studebaker truck, a 1957 Chevy and a 1979 El Camino.

Pareso, 59, of Fountain, has churned out hundreds of pieces of drivable art in his day and won hundreds of awards at car shows. He’s being recognized among the ranks of the elite custom-car builders with his inclusion in the book “Old School Customs: Top Traditional Custom Car Builders,” by gear-head journalist Alan Mayes.

The book, which hit shelves July 15, features a small group of the top builders around the country and “dozens of chopped, sectioned, shaved, decked, flamed, frenched, nosed, lowered and striped Caddies, Mercs, Buicks, Chevys, Oldsmobiles, shoebox Fords, and bubbletops.”

Pareso was shocked to be included. “My question was, ‘Dude, why me?’” he said. “Most of these are guys I look up to. You just don’t figure yourself one of them.”

Boyhood dreams

Pareso fell in love early, with the Little Deuce Coupe.

His parents divorced when he was 10. Pareso moved near Pittsburgh with his mom, and they rented out the garage behind their house to a local car club.

In 1963, when he was 13, the club bought THE Little Deuce Coupe — the ’32 Ford coupe that had been transformed into a hot rod and ended up on the cover of The Beach Boys album “Little Deuce Coupe.”

Pareso knew exactly what they got. After school, he would sit in that beautiful car, possibly the most coveted car in the country at the time. The spell was cast.

The guys in the car club took Pareso to car shows all over the East Coast, he said, where they would show off the Little Deuce Coupe. He had a whole crowd of dads, and he loved what they loved — custom hot rods and drag racing. Nearly a half-century later, Pareso still enjoys cruising around the country to shows with his car buddies.

Pareso’s mom got him a job with a car customizer when he was a teen. Pareso did grunt work, shedding blood from all the metal-flake paint jobs that went through the shop.

Pareso moved to Colorado Springs in 1970, when he was 20, and became a welder and fabricator in a machine shop for the city. He always worked on cars on the side, and was a drag racer for many years, flying down the track on the weekends.

“I miss that,” he said.

In 1991, a bulldozer smashed his arm, and he took disability retirement from the city. That’s when Pareso opened Back Street Kustoms and his hobby became his profession.

True love lasts

It’s still custom cars that spark his motor.

Pareso is a solid man, with thick silver hair and an easy smile. He loves to talk about cars, listen to them growl, and point out details such as the ’57 Chevy hood rockets that line the custom grille of his Studebaker shop truck. As he points, the tattoos on his forearms are revealed — a Mercury shooting out flames, the logo of the Lonely Knights Kustoms club, and a pinup girl who he swears is a depiction of his wife. Luckily for him, she’s a car lover, too.

His tour of the vehicles in his shop also tells the story of his passions.

There’s the 1936 Dodge truck. Once settled up to its fat fenders in dirt in a Wyoming field, it is now looking good, except that it’s collecting dust as Pareso hunts for original parts so he can finish it off. Pareso likes the truck, but he isn’t as turned on by searching for original parts for purist projects as he is about unique creations.

Sure, he dreams about finding beautiful old cars like this tucked away in farmhouse sheds. But once he gets his hands on them, he’s more like Dr. Frankenstein putting disparate parts together to create new life than a museum curator bent on keeping every detail as it was.

“Dave can do it all,” said customer Larry Losasso, of Monument. “But I think his forte is paint and custom body work.”

Losasso should know. He owns the gorgeous silvery ’57 Chevy that Pareso has labored over, off and on, for more than three years. The Chevy looks sleek and classic on the outside. But it’s even more impressive under the hood, where its Space Age guts are completely chrome plated. The car has been thoroughly modified, accompanied by custom changes to the body. Losasso has put about $200,000 into this car, and it shows.

The 1979 El Camino tells a very different story. A soldier at Fort Carson took the car to Pareso, in the hope he can turn raw muscle into a sweet custom. Pareso sees the car as one more sign that car culture isn’t going away — even if the car is 30 years younger than his own, the young guys still love cars and custom jobs.

“They’re more into the hot rod and speed side of things,” he said. “But I don’t think the old cars will go away.”

His only complaint is that many young guys in the custom-car business think they already know everything. He’s suspicious of guys who didn’t go to the old school, believing the only way to learn is to shut up, listen and bleed a little, until you know the secrets.

One of the hardest things to do is to chop a car — cutting and lowering the back to make its lines more sleek — and that is Pareso’s specialty.

“I love customs. I love to chop Mercs and stuff like that,” he said. “How could something so ugly be so beautiful when you’re done?”

That brings the Back Street Kustoms tour around to his 1951 chopped Merc, once a blazing-orange, flamed, fire-belching beauty that Mayes called “as familiar as most any Mercury in the country.”

Chopped Mercurys are big among car fans. But cutting the car, changing its lines, and putting it back together again with custom parts is easy to screw up. Doing it right takes know-how and a good eye for the right curves.
“Dave is one of those guys that has a good eye for what it’s supposed to look like,” Mayes said. “He could chop 100 cars and they’d all look good. It’s an artistic sense really.”

That’s why Mike Arbaney, an engineer in Crested Butte, came to Pareso when he found a 1950 Mercury that he said had been sitting in the same spot for 30 years.

“It looked like a rock,” Arbaney said. “There were lichens growing all over it.”

Pareso helped him restore and modify it. Arbaney figured that since Pareso drives a chopped Merc, he was the man to see. And he wasn’t disappointed.

“He chopped it for me and it turned out awesome,” Arbaney said. “It’s looking pretty sweet now.”

Arbaney’s Mercury might be the dream job for Back Street Kustoms. Pareso believes in doing affordable custom cars that his customers actually drive. He loves to get out the welding torch and put his own stamp on a project. And he likes to tinker around with the final product, to make a machine he can be proud of.

In fact, Pareso’s Merc has been stripped of its trademark flames and orange paint, and sits naked, awaiting a new outfit.

That’s the funny thing about an obsession — the work can never be done. And that drive is what makes Pareso so good at what he does. It’s the answer to Pareso’s question, “why me?”

The ardor he felt for those cars parked behind his house as a boy hasn’t wavered. His car-fueled childhood dreams are still fresh in his mind.

“There was a guy who lived down the street, an older guy, who had a chopped Merc. He’d drive by real slow, with his arm out the window. And I just kept thinking, ‘Man, look at that car,’” Pareso said. “Now, I’m the guy that I always talked about. People say, ‘There goes that old guy with the chopped Merc.’”


Call the writer at 636-0226.