Kansas City’s great movie car man has taken his final ride | Opinion
There was a time in Kansas City when a strange and spectacular vehicle rolling down the street often meant Joe Pace was behind the wheel.
Maybe it was a stainless-steel DeLorean rigged with cables, tubes and blinking lights, belching fog like the time machine from “Back to the Future.” Or a long white 1959 Cadillac ambulance with a roof rack full of ghost-hunting gear, like the Ecto-1 from “Ghostbusters.” Or a 1935 Oldsmobile hearse with Freddy Krueger climbing out the back.
Pace, who died March 1 at 77, was a true Kansas City original — a self-described “poor kid from the Northeast” who turned a lifelong obsession with cars into a side hustle building movie car replicas. Stocky, with long white hair, Pace would drive his custom creations around town and across the country for movie studio promotions, car shows, parties and weddings.
“My cars put smiles on people’s faces,” Pace once told The Star. “That makes me feel good.”
Pace was born in 1948 into a family where cars were the family trade. His father ran Pace’s Speed Shop, one of Kansas City’s early performance garages. By age 9, Pace was hauling parts and running the counter at his uncle Tony’s place on Independence Avenue. At 12, his uncle handed him a 1924 Model T. By 14, he’d traded up to a Model A. He was dazzled by cars before he could legally drive one, and he never kicked the habit.
Pace later opened his own garage, Pace’s Body Shop, at 3533 Independence Avenue in the Northeast, where he repaired wrecked vehicles and did custom work.
‘Back to the Future’ DeLorean
The movie car chapter of his life began in 1985, when Pace learned the Hyatt Regency wanted a DeLorean for a special screening of “Back to the Future.” The movie wasn’t out yet, so Pace studied a poster and a trailer videotaped from TV, copying every detail he could spot.
“He built that thing in about two weeks,” said Justin Baldwin, Pace’s former son-in-law, who was one of the closest people to Pace for the last 25 years. “He’d watch the VHS tape, stop it, go out to the garage to make some piece for it, then come back and watch it again. Joe could make anything.”
Pace spent about $2,500 turning the car into a time machine. After the movie became a hit, he began renting it out for appearances and quickly earned enough to cover both the build and the $16,000 he had paid for the DeLorean.
Replica cars soon became Pace’s calling card. He later built a glow-in-the-dark version of the Ghostbusters wagon and several versions of the shag-covered Mutt Cutts van from “Dumb and Dumber.”
“He loved the attention he got from driving those cars around,” Baldwin said. “But it was also a good business for him for a while. I bet he made several hundred thousand dollars over the years just off those replica cars.”
When he died, friends said, Pace had been chipping away at a version of the bushy green Fiberweed van from the Cheech and Chong movie “Up in Smoke.”
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Celebration of life at Boulevard Drive-In
Cars were his livelihood and his passion, but Pace also spent decades serving the Blue Summit area as a volunteer firefighter and later as a director of the Jackson County Inter City Fire District.
The area, sometimes referred to as Dogpatch, is tucked between Kansas City and Independence and has often struggled with limited resources and internal disputes. Pace was a central figure in the department’s leadership, and sometimes a polarizing one. Disagreements over the district’s finances eventually drew the attention of county investigators and the FBI in the mid-2000s. Pace denied wrongdoing at the time and charges were never filed.
Away from the garage, Pace surrounded himself with the same kind of oddball creativity that defined his cars. His house in Blue Summit included an addition he called the “jungle room,” which was filled with taxidermy (giraffes, lions, monkeys), antique furniture and other unusual collectibles he had salvaged and restored over the years.
“He used to have a real live hedgehog that lived in the house,” Baldwin recalled. “It ate cat food. It’d run up between your legs and scare the hell out of you. Joe loved to get reactions out of people like that. He loved to put something weird in front of you and see how you handled it.”
Hot rods, custom cars welcome
Pace had spent his later years dealing with cancer and kidney disease. He refused surgery and chemotherapy, he told The Star in 2018, because of what he'd watched those treatments do to his parents. In the end, his remaining kidney gave out, leading to adrenal failure.
Pace is survived by four children and two granddaughters. A celebration of his life will be held from 5 to 9 p.m. March 28 at the Boulevard Drive-In in Kansas City, Kansas. Baldwin is helping organize the event. He said attendees are encouraged to turn up in their hot rods and custom cars. Pace sold the DeLorean and the Ghostbusters-mobile to the Celebrity Car Museum in Branson a few years back — but who knows, maybe they’ll make the trip north for the occasion.
Brian Neal, owner of the drive-in, said Pace once made an entrance there that people still talk about. On reopening night in 2012, when the theater celebrated its conversion from film to digital projection with a screening of “Back to the Future,” Pace showed up in his DeLorean.
“It was a free movie night, the place was packed, and Joe rolls up late blasting music super loud,” Neal said. “He was jamming one of the ‘Back to the Future’ songs and he had the DeLorean doors swung up. He had the fog machine going and all the lights. Oh, you should have seen it. Everybody in the place was just loving it.”
This story was originally published March 10, 2026 at 9:44 AM.
