From the October 2004 edition of the Corvette Enthusiast, by Ralph Kramer:
Insideview - Ralph Kramer
St. Louis Build Sheets Blues
Next to the whereabouts of a rumored sixth Grand Sport or the absence of arrest-me-red on the C6 color chart, few mysteries fascinate truly fretful Vetteophiles like the matter of the half-million missing build sheets.
The truly fretful are the most obsessive of Corvette nuts. We can't leave well enough alone. We dither over stuff saner zealots skate right by without even lifting.
Take the build sheet mystery. I'm talking about the 500,000-plus documents - one sacred piece of paper for each Corvette ever built at St. Louis - that disappeared after production moved in mid-'81 to Bowling Green. The better balanced among us have accepted the loss and moved on. Not so the truly fretful. Okay so the sheets are gone. That's a given. We're past the denial stage and into acceptance on that issue. But there must be something left somewhere to help us decipher these pieces of the past.
The only St. Louis build sheet I've ever seriously studied is the one thafs glued to the top of the gas tank on my '67. It's a much less crowded document than the computer-generated version Bowling Green uses now, but it still provides a pretty good word picture of my car at the moment it came off the assembly line. (Two-ply thin-strip whitewalls on a 427/435hp? C'mon.)
Anyway, it was true then and it remains that way today: For better or worse, the build sheet is the ultimate authenticator. Better if it says your L88 started life that way. Worse if it doesn't.
On the line these days at Bowling Green, they stick a copy into a frame cross-member. A duplicate gets filed away. Eventually it becomes a part of the build sheet archive at the National Corvette Museum, from which for aVIN and $30 ($40 for non-members) you can obtain a very nice laminated copy.
There's a bizarre story in how the BG sheets dating back to the '81 start-up were granted immigration status from the plant to the NCM, but we'll get to that some other time.
The build sheet issue was a hot potato long before it burned some of us at Chevrolet 20-plus years ago. From Corvette's earliest days, the sheets were known to exist. But they were seldom acknowledged and even less seldom accessed. Then, in the early '80s, St. Louis decided it was time to rid itself of the flotsam and jetsam of its Corvette era. The word went out that unless Chevrolet wanted to come and get a mountain of files crammed with old build sheets and whatever, they would be destroyed. Looking back, I'm amazed that St. Louis cared so much that it kept them around. Nothing in CM procedure required such lengthy retention.
Anyway, by the time the St. Louis ultimatum became a top-level action item at Chevy, the deed had been done. And hardly anybody at Chevy grieved. Hey, no build sheets, no distracting worries about what to do with them.
Fast-forward to the early '90s. Corvette people were getting pesky. Other CM divisions were starting to release copies of their build sheets. How come Chevrolet couldn't? Or wouldn't.
Jim Perkins, then Chevy's general manager, resolved to finally separate fact from folklore. He assigned Art Armstrong, Dave Hoffa and Tom Hoxie - three executives familiar to Corvette cognoscenti -to: 1) Find proof of whatever happened in St. Louis. 2) Determine once and for all if there are Corvette-related papers in that mysterious Pennsylvania cave where CM stores vital records. 3) Sift through the five million records in the Leonard storage facility in Detroit. And 4) Track down any other leads.
Months later, Jim got the report: Yes, the St. Louis files are well and truly gone. And no, nothing relevant surfaced anywhere else.
Case closed.
But wait. Even as the hobby absorbed the news, the truly fretful remained dubious. How is it possible the mountain of paper generated in a variety of forms on several fronts by the assembly, sale and service of every Corvette built during the St. Louis was all gone?
It's not easy proving a negative.
So Kurt Ritter, who, became Chevy general marketing manager in '99, gave Jim Mattison a green light a couple of years later to revisit the issue.
As a young CM engineer 40 years ago, Jim routinely exercised his infamous 409 on Detroit's more competitive streets. His sleuthing skills are top notch, too. Since the early '90s, his company - Pontiac Historical Services - has been handling queries and providing build sheets and other materials under an arrangement where Pontiac pays him exactly nothing.
At Bloomington Gold in 2003, Jim let it be known he was making progress on the Corvette front. The original build sheets may be gone, but he thought various documents done up for transportation, sales and bookkeeping purposes might contain useful info. Although the Perkins searchers had found none, Jim thought some microfilm might still exist.
Then, last winter, Kurt Ritter got reassigned to a new Pontiac/Buick/GMC combine, and quickly quit CM. With him went Jim's charter. As of June, he was still talking with corporate brand communications and CM heritage people about what he does and how he does it.
Meanwhile, the truly fretful dwell in troubled anticipation while the merely zealous enjoy another nifty Corvette summer.
ad
About 16 years ago I 'deleted' the engine; I finally got Project YellowVette back on track this spring. Hope to have the engine 'un-deleted' by January, with any luck. 
