Finding the Road Rebels is a memoir about fast cars, family secrets, and growing up in the shadow of a story told in pieces.
On October 31, 1966, a young Medford man named Paul Grasso was killed when his '33 Ford coupe left Massachusetts Route 93 and crashed into a house. Rumors followed the spectacular wreck. No clear answers did. Few people knew he had fathered a baby girl.
Doreen Frances grew up with a dad-but not with the truth. Her biological father had denied her paternity and kept her existence hidden from his family. After his death, his name surfaced only in fragments. Stories shifted depending on who was telling them. Questions about the crash lingered, but the details never fully aligned. Decades later, when Paul was erased from his own mother's eulogy, Doreen reached her limit. Determined to understand the man who had refused to claim her-and the night that ended his life-she set out to find the Road Rebels, the teenage hot rod club he founded in the late 1950s.
An online post led her into the working-class world her father once called home: garages, drag strips, long-held friendships, and memories shaped by time. As she pieced together accounts from the men who knew him best, she began to see not only who her father had been, but how growing up as a secret, unknown to so many who remembered him, had followed her into adulthood.