"Electric Dreams"
by Caroline Kettlewell

Scheduled to be published in April is an easy-reading, feel-good 304-page book subtitled One Unlikely Team of Kids and the Race to Build the Car of the Future. A true story, Electric Dreams tells how some underprivileged high school kids in NASCAR country North Carolina won the first-ever contest to build an electric car.

Ms. Kettlewell has written other memoir books and is a regular contributor to the Washington Post. She introduces the reader to an interesting assortment of small-town southern characters and the science teacher from California who made a difference in his students’ lives. She also writes informatively about electric car technology and never-say-die invention.

The teacher, Eric Ryan, had been a pre-med student at Berkeley who when he was 20 went “searching”– he dropped out of school, worked in construction, fished in Alaska, went back to Berkeley, changed his major, graduated, went backpacking and spent a year teaching part-time at East Los Angeles High School, an alternative school for troubled youths. This led him to Teach For America, an organization which offers young college graduates who want to change the world an opportunity to start by serving in rural and inner-city schools where teachers are scarce.

At age 26 Eric wound up at Northampton High School-East in northeastern North Carolina. The beige one-story school building was, as Kettlewell describes it, from the fallout shelter school of design. Houses in nearby towns such as Jackson and Woodward flew flags displaying only a number – 3 or 9 or 22 – next to the stars and stripes, declaring their loyalties to particular NASCAR drivers as well as to their country.

The Research Triangle of Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill lies two hours to the west while the tourist-rich Outer Banks are about an hour away. But in between are hardscrabble farms and small towns whose populations were smaller in 1990 than they had been in 1900. Kids had little expectation of success and figured to stay there and work like their parents had.

The second year Eric taught there Harold Miller, a teacher of auto technology for 24 years at Northampton-East, who grew up with a torque wrench in his hand and a grease rag tucked in a pocket, told him, “We’re gonna build an electric car!” John Parker, who taught math and physics at Northampton-East, had just told Harold about a competition sponsored by Virginia Power for teams of high school students from the mid-Atlantic region to convert standard automobiles into electric-powered vehicles. And they would get to test their cars at the Richmond International Raceway where drivers like Dale Earnhardt and Richard Petty had made NASCAR history.

The boys and girls enrolled in Auto Tech I and II saw a picture of GM’s sleek Impact electric car and thought they would have to build something like that. “We can’t!” But Eric told them they and not their teachers would convert a regular car, gut it and rebuild it as an EV. It would have an electric motor and run on batteries instead of gasoline.

Although North Carolina Power was a division of Virginia Power, no schools in their part of the state had been invited to compete. After all, they were poor down there in the northeast and had no industry to speak of, much less high-tech ones. But a local power official went to bat for them and got a four-high-school team, including Northampton-East, entered in the contest under the name ECORV, Electric Cars of the Roanoke Valley.

You’ll read just how the team converted a 1985 twice-totaled white Ford Escort they called Shocker, learned to drive it and won the EV Grand Prix, which brought them money and grants, including a $10,000 “Spirit of Kitty Hawk” award from the North Carolina Technological Development Authority. That was only the beginning.

Published by Carroll & Graf of New York, the book will cost $24. For information, visit www.avalonpub.com.