Manor’s curator of vintage cars

By Erick Slattery | Manor Ink

Have you ever driven past a particular property on Old Rte. 17 in Livingston Manor and thought, shipping containers? A beached school bus? Vintage cars? What’s going on here?

Manor Ink got a peek behind the curtain!

Some people collect Pokemon cards. Manor resident Andy O’Rourke collects cars. He has more than 40 and they are all special in some way. He has race cars, vintage cars and a very rare Volkswagen golf cart. The Ink met O’Rourke on his property to hear his adventurous life story.

O’Rourke grew up in a military family in San Antonio, Texas. His father instilled in him a love of cars, starting when he was a young child. In those days, he worked side-by-side with his father fixing cars, so by the age of 14, he could repair any vehicle almost entirely by himself.

Because his parents sent him to Arcadia, a boys camp in Parksville, Andy developed a love of Sullivan County and the Catskills.

When O’Rourke was a teenager, he spotted what was then one of his favorite cars while on his newspaper route, and he asked the owner if he could buy it. The car was nearly in shambles, but Andy could see its potential. The owner told him that if he could fix it in two or three weeks, O’Rourke could keep it. Determined to amaze the man, the teenager repaired the car by the deadline and became its owner. That vehicle was the start of his extensive car collection, and he’s still curating it today. Each car has a story, and the Ink heard loads of them.

After studying engineering in college, O’Rourke became a race car driver. Each year, he had the option to keep one of the cars instead of collecting a bonus. He often chose a car.

O’Rourke, however, didn’t always lead a charmed life doing what he loved. After the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001, he was a first responder and exposure to the site’s toxins led to a diagnosis of throat cancer in 2012. After numerous treatments, doctors told him that he would have only six months to live. As heartbreaking as that news was, he somehow managed to get better little by little as the months passed. He even considered his recovery a “miracle of science.”

“You know, it’s the spirit. I do think your approach to life matters,” O’Rourke said. Today, 12 years later, he is living his dream in retirement with his amazing car collection.

Currently his favorite car is a green MG he restored. The project took him about a year. “It went from being a rusty old hulk to being museum quality,” he said. His oldest car is his 1901 curved-dash Oldsmobile, and one of the best cars he has is a 1973 Citroën 2CV – which has all of two horsepower!