David Soul has had success as pop singer and stage actor. But it’s as police detective Kenneth Hutchinson in the cheesy 1970s television drama Starsky and Hutch that he will forever be best known
Cheesy 1970s television? OK, redundant. Yet even for that era, Starsky and Hutch was especially ripe fromage.
Each episode, Hutch and partner David Starsky (Paul Michael Glaser) would skid and slide through the streets of the California town of “Bay City” in a jacked-up 1974 Ford Gran Torino, tomato red with great white side slashes (or sometimes a ’75 or ’76 Gran Torino—the show went through a lot of cars). Often they seemed to just slither about at random. But really they were hunting down crooks who apparently were unaware that the flashiest vehicle in three states was occupied by a pair of undercover cops.
Guess those crooks weren’t getting the word on the street. Unlike Messrs. S. and H., plugged in to all goings-on courtesy of informant Huggy Bear (Antonio Fargas), a jive-spouting bar owner with a keen sense of civic responsibility.
Now, David Soul has four-wheel-drifted back into the public eye with a new project. A long-time fan of both Cuba and Ernest Hemingway, he’s working on a documentary series that follows the restoration of Papa Hemingway’s 1955 Chrysler New Yorker DeLuxe convertible. You may recall that the writer and sportsman’s ragtop resurfaced a year or so back after being “lost”—or maybe just misplaced—for 50 years.
We learn of this development from, no, not Huggy Bear, but travel writer Christopher P. Baker, who at his Moon Handbooks blog describes being drawn into the project at Soul’s invitation.
Baker provides some interesting tidbits about the restoration, but sadly, no photographs. Looks like the plan is to keep the car under wraps until the annual Hemingway academic (and drinking) gathering in Havana.
