It all started at a five-and-dime store in 1945, when Neil Blanchette was a rambunctious toddler. His mother was shopping when she realized that little Neil, who was in a carriage with a cover, was unusually quiet. As he told us, “To my right, there was a whole shelf full of toy cars. I reached over, grabbed one, and started playing with it. When my mom saw this, she figured if that kept me quiet, she would buy me one.” In addition, Blanchette’s uncle owned a Chevrolet dealership, and he would pass along the promo models that dealerships handed out in those days. Blanchette’s father, who wasn’t necessarily a car guy, nevertheless bought a new Chevrolet every year.
Blanchette started driving at night under his father’s supervision at age 14, and at 15 he started driving legally on a so-called “Cinderella license,” which allowed new drivers to operate a vehicle between dawn and dusk. Also at 15, Blanchette acquired his first car.
“I bought it from a friend that lived around the corner from us. He was trying to tune it up, and he didn’t know how to do it because it started backfiring when he would start it. I went over there to see what the problem was, and I said, ‘You’ve got the timing all wrong.’ He kicked the tire and said, ‘You want to buy a car cheap?’ So, I bought it for ten dollars. It was a ’49 Chevy.” A year later Blanchette sold that car for $175, thus commencing a lifetime of buying, selling, and collecting Chevrolets. In the past seven decades, he says he’s owned a total of 210 of them.
As for Corvettes, Blanchette has owned 19 throughout his life, including a pair of ’53s, one of which sported a Pontiac V-8; five ’54s; a ’55; a one-year-old ’67 coupe that he only had for two months before it was stolen and spirited away to Santo Domingo, beyond the reach of the law; a ’78 Pace Car; and a ’90, among others. However, the Cascade Green ’56 seen here is the one he has held onto the longest—30 years and counting.
The 1956 model year brought sweeping updates, not to mention a number of firsts for Corvette. The most obvious change was a beautifully revised exterior with sculpted side coves that permitted the first two-tone paint combinations. In addition, the new model featured external door handles and locks, roll-up glass windows (with available power assist), an optional power soft-top, and a removable auxiliary hardtop.
Under the hood, a quintet of 265-ci V-8s were available, two paired with the optional Powerglide automatic transmission, and three with the standard three-speed manual. The most popular engine was RPO 469, the 225-hp engine equipped with a pair of Carter four-barrel carburetors. “Popular” is actually an understatement because 88 percent of ’56 buyers opted for this $172.20 option. For an additional $188.30, it could be combined with the RPO 449 Special High-Lift Camshaft, which bumped horsepower to 240. Only 111 cars rolled out of St Louis’s doors with this “for racing purposes only” option.
A peek inside the trunk revealed telltale signs of the car’s original color.
In May 1956, Road & Track tested a pair of 225-hp cars, one with the three-speed and the other with the optional Powerglide. Despite a 30-hp advantage, the Powerglide-equipped car showed no appreciable increase in acceleration times over an equally equipped ’55. The “stick,” however, was much quicker. With a 0-60 time of 7.3 seconds, the ’56 was already 1.4 seconds ahead of the ’55, and from there the gap opened to two seconds to 80, and a full four seconds at the century mark. In addition to this engine performance, Zora Duntov and his engineers had performed a number of improvements on the chassis that made the car more neutral and predictable at its handling limits.
These upgrades transformed the fledgling Corvette into a true sports car, as evidenced by numerous speed records at Daytona Speed Weeks and class wins in road-racing competition. At the former, held in Daytona, Florida, stock Corvettes driven by John Fitch and Betty Skelton averaged 145.543 and 137.773 mph, respectively, in the flying mile. Both speeds topped the Ford Thunderbird (134.404 mph) and Jaguar XK140MC (134.078 mph). In the acceleration tests, Fitch’s speed of 86.872 mph topped 10 of the 12 Thunderbirds on hand, while Skelton bested nine T-Birds with a speed of 85.531 mph. Of course, the big news of the week was Duntov laying down a two-way average of 147.300 mph in the flying mile and 89.753 mph in the standing mile while driving a modified ’56.
The first road race of the year was the 12 Hours of Sebring in March. Three Corvettes were entered, but it was Fitch and Walt Hansgen who grabbed Ninth overall and the first class win for Corvette in international road-course competition. On the opposite coast the following month, Dr. Dick Thompson drove the Venetian Red No. 46 Corvette to victory in Class C at the last Pebble Beach National Road Races. Thompson would have taken the overall victory, but he surrendered the lead to Tony Settember’s Mercedes Benz SL300 when the Corvette’s brakes gave up the ghost late. Thompson would go on to win the SCCA C Production Championship that year, proving the ’56 Corvette was a winner on both the street and the track.
Hidden Treasure
In early 1994 Blanchette sold a ’57 Corvette when he was offered almost $5,000 more than market value. This move, however, left him without a Corvette for several months. “I was walking around in circles,” he told us. One day he was at a garage when the proprietor, who was a friend, asked if he was still looking for a Corvette because one of his customers was looking to sell. Blanchette said yes and asked the vintage. The friend didn’t know but related that the customer thought it was “a ’64, ’65, or something like that.” Blanchette said he didn’t want a car that new, but figured it couldn’t hurt to take a look and maybe buy it cheap to flip.
The following Monday Blanchette called the number he’d been given and got the owner’s wife. When he asked to speak to the gentleman, she said he was sick in bed and could not come to phone. Blanchette asked her a few questions, but she knew nothing about the car. She did, however, offer the following: “My brother-in-law and my brother are coming from Ohio, and they’re going to be here on Wednesday. They know more about the car. I hate the car—I’ve hated it from the beginning.” Before hanging up, Blanchette arranged a visit on Wednesday at two o’clock.
At the appointed time Blanchette knocked on the door, and the owner’s brother and brother-in-law answered and took him out to the garage behind the house. He picks up the story: “The garage was two-and-a-half cars wide, and when they opened that door, there were two relatively new Mercurys, and the remaining half wasn’t big enough for another car. Inside the garage was another garage door that led to a small space, and when they opened there was a car inside.
“What the guy did was pull the Corvette in, jack up the front, and pull the car in by the jack and park the car cockeyed in that small room.” Blanchette peered into the darkened corner of the garage and saw a Corvette covered with printed sheets, pillowcases, and blankets, but he could tell by the shape that it was not a ’65 or ’66. It was a C1.
“When I realized it was a ’56 or ’57, I got excited,” he continued. After I looked at it, I popped the hood and found it had dual quads on it. The first 50 [Chevrolet] made had dual quads and all the options that you could get on a Corvette.” Based on these observations, Blanchette knew the car was a very early ’56, but he didn’t know just how early until he checked the serial number on the driver-side door post. “I wiped my finger over the serial number and looked closely and it read ‘zero, zero, one, zero, zero, six.’ I said to myself, ‘This can’t be number six.’ I could hardly contain myself.”
Blanchette had a certain amount he could offer for the car, but there were a few thousand dollars between that and what the owner was asking. After the wife conferred with her husband, they came to an agreement by which Blanchette would put a cash down payment on the car, then return in a few days with the balance to pick it up. Before he left that Monday, he did have an opportunity to speak with the owner. Although the gentleman was, sadly, on his deathbed, he was able to share some details about the car’s past.
In 1955 he was living in Cleveland when he first saw renditions of what the restyled Corvette was going to look like for 1956. He liked what he saw, so he went to his local dealer and said he wanted “one of the first new Corvettes off the line.” The salesmen called St. Louis to see what number they were up to, and he was told number 49. The prospective owner had hoped for a much lower number and said he’d have to think on the matter. The salesmen, eager to close the deal, told him not to wait too long. After some consideration, the man asked the salesman if there were any cancellations on earlier orders. A second phone call to the plant revealed that the order on serial number six had been cancelled earlier that day. “Number six? In red?” the man asked, but the salesman replied that it was instead “some kind of green.” The man’s desire for a low serial number was greater than his lust for a red car, so he bought it. He enjoyed the car for many years, but after encountering some maintenance issues in 1969, he ensconced it in that small corner of his garage, where it remained until Blanchette purchased it the week before Christmas in 1994.
It was fortuitous that Blanchette spoke to the owner when he did, because when he returned two days later, his wife told him her husband had passed away. After offering his condolences, he quietly loaded the car onto his friend’s rollback wrecker and took it to a shop in Claymont, Delaware, where he pulled the plugs, oiled the cylinders, rebuilt the carburetors, and successfully got the engine running. Sort of.
“The car smoked like a chimney,” he told us. “We figured the rings had to free up a little bit, even though I oiled the cylinders down for about a month. There was so much smoke in the garage, it was down to our level from the ceiling. [My friend said] ‘These rings are about frozen to the pistons. Not all of them, but most of them. The only way to do this is to tear the engine down and do it over.’” Although the friend had other jobs pending at the garage, he agreed to spend some extra time on the car with Blanchette.
While they worked on the engine, Blanchette cleaned up and painted the engine compartment and gave its red paint, which he called “some sort of Porsche red,” a coat of wax. However, as he continued disassembling the car, its original color, Cascade Green, revealed itself. The discovery made this ’56 all the more special because, of the 3,467 Corvettes built that year, just 290 left the factory in this light turquoise hue, and only 147, including this car, wore it in combination with beige coves.
Once Blanchette had the car running reliably and safely, he put in back on the road for a year in its non-original red finish before wheeling into a paint booth around Thanksgiving 1995. “My friend and I worked out a deal to use his body shop and paint booth. I stripped all the red paint, fixed a few cracks in the fiberglass, and sprayed on this beautiful Cascade Green,” he said. During this time, he also replaced the black interior with the proper light beige set from Al Knoch Interiors. Fourteen months later, in the spring of 1997, he completed the restoration, and he’s been enjoying his low-serial-number ’56 for nearly 30 years since.
Has Blanchette shied away from driving this rare, early ’56 Corvette? Certainly not. He has added 10,000 miles to the original 40,711 over the years, most of which were logged driving to shows and events where the car has collected more than 300 trophies. In fact, when the author met with him in August 2024, he’d just returned from Corvettes at Carlisle the day before, and he planned to attend a ’50s-themed car show in Ocean City, New Jersey, the following weekend. That’s almost 500 miles in a single week. The car is clearly no “trailer queen,” and Blanchette should be commended for sharing it with the world.
After almost three decades of ownership, what does the future hold for Neil Blanchette, a recent widower, and his beloved ’56? “I’ve had a lot of fun with the car,” he told us. “I’ve promised it to my son down in Fort Myers, Florida. That’s a great place to have this car. I was going to give it to him this year, but I decided to enjoy it for a couple more years, so my son went out and bought a 35-foot boat to enjoy in meantime. He knows he’s going to get the car eventually, and when he is finished with it, he’ll hand it down to his grandson to keep it the family.”
Let’s hope that those younger generations will continue to drive and share the car as a shining example of the epoch when Corvette rightfully earned the title of America’s Sports Car.
