A Farmingdale man defied the odds after being told he would never walk again by restoring a classic hot rod — and now he’s headed to Long Island for a popular car show with a new lease on life.
Tony Pedro, 65, will display the 1957 Corvette he began restoring while recovering from a motorcycle crash on Sunday, when he joins other owners whose wild backstories bring them together for the Oyster Bay car show at Tobay Beach.
“You don’t do these shows just for the cars, you really do it for the people and the stories,” Pedro said of the event, which will run from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Pedro, a former city correction officer, was sent careening into a tree when he was “broadsided” by a cabbie in Queens in 2008.
“I was left there to die,” Pedro told The Post of the accident.
“They had to bring me back to life in the ambulance by pumping on my chest,” Pedro said.
“I broke my hip in two places, broke my back, cracked my sternum, fractured my jaw, broke my knee, broke my ankle, and tore up tons of muscles.”
Pedro was told he would never walk again but he found his motivation to prove doctors wrong when he saw a friend put up the Corvette for sale for $36,000.
“I called him up while I still had tubes down my throat and up my nose,” Pedro said.
“I was restoring it every day. I had two friends to help me get up, down, and sit up.”
Pedro credits near 600-horsepower teal-blue ride — and the chance to someday drive it — as his intrepid motivation to painstakingly regain the ability to walk, miraculously, only about six months after his collision.
“That car saved my life — literally,” he said of the car, which he claims caught the eye of an Arab sheikh who offered him a whopping $250,000 for it.
Slow ride
The free show in Oyster Bay will also include Rick Hassell, 61, of West Islip and his 1967 Cadillac DeVille, which is worth around $40,000 and receives lots of attention from older enthusiasts.
However, the dark red convertible — he jokes you can fit three bodies comfortably in the trunk — serves an even more special place in the Hassell family lore.
“My father had this tradition that when the kids are born, you pick them up at the hospital and you bring them home in a Cadillac,” said Hassell.
“Because when you die many years later, hopefully you’re going to be going out in a Cadillac,” he added of the hearse maker.
Naturally, Hassell kept the tradition alive for his three children, born in the late 1990s and 2000, with the DeVille.
“When my daughter was born, this car was actually out of service, so I panicked,” he recalled.
“I called a friend who had one and told him why I needed to borrow it. He said, ‘Come and get it.’”
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Lots of miles
Nicole Romano, has had a long connection to her dad John Romano’s prized green speedster — a 1968 Pontiac GTO that folks are willing to pay $80,000 for.
“As a senior in high school, because she had straight As, she could have the car one day a week,” Romano, now 85, recalled.
“The principal of her school gave up his space for it and would call me up to say, ‘John, everything is good.”
Since then, the two have enjoyed a tremendous bond over the cars, as Nicole would change the oil and perform other routine work on the speed demon, one that “Fast and Furious” actress Michelle Rodriguez once rode shotgun in.
“It’s amazing how these pieces of machinery bring everybody together,” said Romano, who added that Pedro, a friend of his from car shows, works on the GTO now.
