The National Corvette Museum (NCM), Bowling Green, KY, Wendell K. Strode, Executive Director.        

The mission of the NCM is to celebrate the Corvette's invention, preserve the Corvette’s past, present, and future. The museum also serves as an educational place to provide information to collectors, automobile historians and the general public, about the Corvette and to promote the conservation, preservation and restoration of Corvettes.

The NCM is divided into six distinct display areas and a wing of administrative offices. Passing through the front doors you will see a rotating display with a special “theme” car that ties into an event or a special display. Once in the building, the administrative offices are in a wing to your left, the gift shop covers the entire area to your front and the ticket desk as well as a Kentucky tourism bureau desk is to your right. Once through the ticket gate and you are in the display and delivery area where new Corvettes are on display to be picked up by their owners who have taken advantage of the NCM delivery option when they ordered their car. One is tempted to walk down this row of shiny new Corvettes, but the theater is just to your right and is well worth the 15 minutes to watch a film on the history of the Corvette and this serves a great introduction to the car and the museum.

Coming out of the theater leads right into the Nostalgia area where the history of the original car is shown in great detail along with pictures of the people who created and herded the idea through the General Motors bureaucracy. The display in an authentic small town service station with period gas pumps and one of the original, of only 300 produced, 1953 Corvettes at the pump. As you wind through the corridors past the Corvette Hall of Fame and the Route ‘66’ display highlighting Corvettes of the 60’s, cars are presented in chronological order. For the 1970’s they have actual machinery from the now closed St. Louis assembly plant, along with a movie of the plant in operation and listen to a tape recorded at the plant when it was in full production. Around the corner is the “Corvette Performance” section with the actual cars that set several world speed events and won countless races and leads to the design and development area where ground braking, at the time, developments are displayed as well as prototypes of the corvettes of the future. The corridor winds past the delivery showroom where you can drive off in your new Corvette, if you chose the NCM delivery option, and leads you into the sky dome where over 30 cars are on display to round out the cars not show in the other exhibits. The NCM maintains at least one of each model year on display to include the only 1983 Corvette produced. As you exit the sky dome you walk down the corridor of new Corvette waiting for their owners to come pick them up and drive them off. The last stop in the museum is of course the gift shop, which even though the must bring in cash aspect of it is sad; it is an awesome gift shop that has many one of a kind items and every imaginable product for you, a Corvette and the automotive historian as they maintain a large collections of historical literature and memorabilia.

The downside of the NCM is that it is a 501(c) 3 not-for-profit foundation so unfortunately a lot of space is dedicated to fund raising and supporting the museum. As one walks up to the museum the walkway is made of personal bricks which members have purchased to help fund the museum. To further enhance cash intake, the museum gift shop is strategically located so that one is forced to exit out through it as you leave the display area. Also the two most “kid friendly” displays, a 2006 Corvette convertible that you can sit in and “play” on and a collection of Corvette pinball machines to play, are located right at the entrance to the gift shop.

The NCM maintains archives as the repository of all historical information on the Corvette, and is tasked to preserve, printed technical materials and of all Corvettes and is the proponent agency for facts about the cars. From their archives you can find out that besides mine, there are five other 1995 ZR-1 Corvettes in dark red metallic with black interiors. The archives also will make reproduction window stickers and build sheets for any Corvette manufactured, so a second or third owner can have an original window sticker made if the first owner kept for themselves or threw theirs away.

Overall a great experience, the NCM truly does what its mission is to do; it provides the preservation of the Corvette, past, present and future.