Remembering Alex Kowalski at the National Corvette Museum

by philg

Our loyal reader and thoughtful commenter Alex Kowalski died of cancer two years ago (see Rest in Peace, Alex Kowalski). A few of us got together on some memorial tiles at the National Corvette Museum. One of Alex’s skills was dealer-level car maintenance and he rebuilt the engine on a 1968 C3 Corvette.

We stopped into the Cathedral of Corvette in August 2025 to pay our respects to Alex and to the engineering behind the machine that he loved enough to rebuild.

The visit started with a Nissan Altima identifying as a Corvette:

The memorial for Alex is just inside the entrance:

Here’s a crazy story about a Corvette that rose from its tomb:

The same year/generation Corvette that Alex had, driven by Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell (passed away just a few days after our museum visit, on August 7, 2025 at age 97):

Some relevant advice from the Corvette Club of Tennessee: “Life is Short: Keep the Pedal to the Metal”. I wish that Alex’s life had been longer, but am glad that we have the memories at the museum and here on this server.

18 thoughts on “Remembering Alex Kowalski at the National Corvette Museum”

  1. Rest in peace, Alex. I did not realize he was that old. Our birthdays are almost the same. Glad you guys got together to memorialize and remember him.

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  2. Sad to hear. My father died of prostate cancer at about the same age in the early 1990s. I mentioned this here before, I think, but his untimely death made me reconsider my priorities in life. My father’s cancer was diagnosed late, he was mostly just dog tired all the time. In this day and age it does seem like Alex should have been diagnosed and treated earlier. I guess “superior” modern healthcare science doesn’t mean squat with the shitfest of a healthcare system we have in the U.S.

    He was lucky though that his school had a rifle club (with girls even). Cute girls with an interest in rifles? Sign me up! Thanks for remembering Alex, Phil.

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    • I know I’m not smart, interesting, or funny, and I’m slowly bricking the internet one low-effort shitpost at a time, but…when I die this might be a fitting memorial to play:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUBflOTXKsU

      Ta ta for now. Back to fighting Republicans trying to re-prohibit muh weed and Demmycrats and Republicans trying to take away muh gunz.

  3. Thanks, Phil for this column, and for keeping Alex in our collective thoughts. He was special, a fantastic contributor to your blog, and I still miss him and his work.

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  5. My dearest Philip, friends of Alex, blog members, families and friends of the Corvette Museum:
    For the major part of yesterday, July 6th, it started with me crying out his name, silently. weeping
    so I wouldn’t bother his dad in bed, and kept going for a while 2 hours approximately, in mostly silence, (we live in the woods here) until I had my morning coffee fix, I finally bought a Chemex and hopefully good arabica beans, and then I ventured to the local grocery store in my Subaru, with 209,000 miles, in need of transmission work, aaaaaafter a visit to an oldies but goodie mechanic that Alex knew when he was alive, a Christian man, older man, who still repairs transmissions and fixes cars, he replaced the drive shaft on our subaru so we could make it last until the next vehicle, when suddenly, without watning, the car over heated, ALL of the internal lights went on, I was afraid that the engine was “freezing” because Alex warned me about that earlier, so I pulled right over, under a BRIDGE in Sturbridge Masachusetts, traffice on my left side was Horrendous! Then called his dad to rescue me, and he said, “Do you want me to help yoo? Of course I said, Yes, what else would I be calling about? He said, Ok, I will call Charlie, our friend in Holland, we will be there as soon as we can, which he did right away! After all, I am almost 80, he is 82 and it was the “anniversary” of Alex’s death! What it seemed like to me, was a symbol, from our guardian angel, up above, Alexander Eugene Kowalski, no longer resting, taking care of his parents from above, seeing to it that they would make it through the day, fighting, not giving up, just like he did trying to fight that demon of cancer that had invaded his body and brain, only to have a merciful God, take him as quickly as possible on that fateful night, July 6th, 2023, taking his last breath, his SILVER CROSS, removed, his entire body cleaned and washed by his father and hospice nurse, then taken away from us, in the darkest of night, raining, iwrapped in cloth, taken to a crematorium in Worcester Mass., he wanted half of his ashes to be spread in NUBBLE LIGHT< MAINE, half with us, to be with us and the doggies, especially Einstein, CODY, CLEO, SCRAPPY, PENNY, and his childhood friend, FARFUL, along with his beloved CAT, BORIS, and CIRSAY! A host of ASHES, and waiting for his brother's remains, and David and I, hopefully we will be able to make it another few years, to take care of his brother, who suffers from his mental illness, and has to be on MEDS for the erst of his life, he will be 53 on the 12th of July. He misses Alex terribly but has only wonderful memories of him, we gave him one of Alex's fondest watches, self winding, automatic Steel Dive, just wind it up and hold it in his hand and turn it left, right, left, right, and the little hand starts keeping the time. He loves it, also two molded golden retrievers, and a molded female COW, with Udders, he wanted one for his birthday, and several other gifts, he loved to celebrate his and his brother's birthdays because they were s o close we were able to spend alot of good years with Alex before he became so ill. We all renenber his smile, his endless enthusiasm, his love of country, his need for speed, in all areas of life, his relentless advice, like his dad, I am always RIGHT! his ability to rise above, prejudice, one of his best friends was a black man, young in college at NJIT, with him in the late 1980's, who we entertained for him at XMAS, great guy, helped Alex with alot of extracurricular activities.
    Needless to say, Philip but I will anyway, his dad and I cherish every moment he was alive, from the first to the last, like the song by Kenny Rogers, "Goodbye", we pray for he and his cousin, SAVVAS SAVAPOULOS, PHILIP SAVOPOULOS< AMY AND THEIR HOUSEKEEPER< WHO LOST THEIR LIVES LIKE CHARLIE KIRK DID IN WASHINGTON D.C. in 2019. D,C, manshion murders, Alex, Savvas and Charlie are all together now, lookng down at all of us from above, forever I hope. God bless America, and God bless you and your wonderful family and the work you do. Thank you wtih all my heart.
    Fondly,
    Karen K.
    P.S.
    Please ecuse the misspellings, even though I have lenses in both eyes, 20-20 vision, I still have trouble with the computer and typos!

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  6. > The visit started with a Nissan Altima identifying as a Corvette:

    LOL! Dr. Greenspun needs to write another book!

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    • :Not Anonymous should not waste his or her time being NOT ANONYMOUS! Life IS TOO SHORT! Philip is a VITAL person on this website! He saved Alex K. angony during the last 4 to 5 years of his life! Get real anonymous, you should write a book on how NOT to be the devil’s advocate! SHAME ON YOU!

    • Anonymous: OK, Dr. Greenspun needs to write a book while devoting lots of time to the blog.

    • PhilG: Yeah, I agree about students losing the attention span to read. But I don’t agree about teaching with YouTube videos.

      Reaching via YT is fine, depending on what’s it for. Entertainment, sure, short piece of information, sure. Replacement for books, no. How would you replace your RWD book with videos? It would be way too much work to convey the whole information.

      And if the whole information is not conveyed, it would become like propaganda.

      The arguments I would give would be similar to “Amusing ourselves to Death”.

    • NA: I didn’t mean to suggest that books had no value. I still like them. But readers of books seems to be quite literally a dying breed. We’re headed for a Zen kōan situation. Is a book “great” when nobody has read it? (we’re already there with humanities PhDs and journal articles, I think!)

    • How about Phil writing a book on gambling?

      “The darkness is gathering again. Americans, once members of a proudly literate society, read much less than they used to…A study analyzing 236,000 responses to the American Time Use Survey found that the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023…Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: Last year, 57 percent of Americans placed a bet.

      https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/reading-crisis-postliterate-age/687618/

    • NH: Also, watching sports. Growing up at the tail end of the Baby Boom (born in 1963), I don’t remember anyone in our neighborhood who watched more than two sports games per week. Given the five or six TV channels that were available, maybe it would have been possible to watch five or six. Today, however, it is possible to watch sports matches 24/7.

    • NH, PhilG: Thanks for the links. I will try to read them. I used to subscribe to The Atlantic when I was in the States.

      Here’s the overall observation I have, the more emotional the people become, the more they start indulging in things that need a shorter attention span, and things that are always trying to incite an emotional response.

      All activities that you mention are using the emotions of the masses as a feedback mechanism for their content. Those entities behave like sociopathic politicians, expert at reading the emotions of the masses and who are just after power.

      NH, there’s this cool indie puzzle game called Braid if you’re into games.

    • On thinking more: Goes against Dr. Greenspun’s interests, perhaps, but something on Digital minimalism would be timely, with loads of humour. Since he has seen the internet going through all its phases and, seems to enjoy life outside of it, from the blogposts.

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