Solving the mystery of this photograph required enlarging the image and reading the name tags.
The boy in the herringbone cap, it turns out, is a 10-year-old Corky Coker, now a well-known Chattanooga businessman and car enthusiast.
The pre-World War I clothing is a red herring. The photo was taken in 1964 at a district meeting of the Antique Car Club of America at the Holiday Inn East on Brainerd Road. Dressing to match the model year of a collector car was, and is, popular in the hobby.
The photo appeared in the Chattanooga News-Free Press on April 18, 1964. About 150 Antique Car Club of America members and 75 vehicles were represented at the two-day meeting here, the newspaper reported.
In the driver's seat, wearing a striped vest, is the late Harold Coker, Corky's father, who was a Hamilton County commissioner and local Republican Party leader.
Harold Coker's wife, Lillian, and daughter, Christie (now Christie Bowen, of Leiper's Fork, Tennessee), are also pictured, along with E.B. Alloway. Harold Coker and Alloway were directors of the event, and the vehicle in the photo is a vintage Ford that remains in the Coker family today.
"It's a 1913 Model T roadster," Corky Coker said in a telephone interview this week. "It was the first car my dad ever restored. ... I still have that car."
"I remember him working on it," Coker added. "He restored that car in the basement of our home on Midland Pike (in Brainerd)."
Coker said when this photo was made, he attended Woodmore Elementary School. His father had just begun to build his retail tire business here and would open an iconic tire store on Brainerd Road in 1966. The family later started a company that manufactures tires for antique cars and trucks.
Corky Coker chuckled after looking closely at his socks in the photo.
"I played on a knot-hole baseball team and those were my baseball socks," he said.
Read other installments of the "Remember When, Chattanooga?" series at ChattanoogaHistory.com and follow the public group on Facebook.
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