Stephen's Herbie….

This web site is dedicated to our son and his most favorite car in the whole world, Herbie "The Love Bug". Now, as most of you know, Herbie was first created by Walt Disney and appeared in his first full feature movie in 1969. There are many web sites that deal with the history of Herbie both old and new. The "Links" page of this site will give you a listing of some of the sites you may want to visit.

However, this site mainly deals with our son Stephen and his car, a 1965 replica. Stephen is a 41 year old who was born with a disability that has left him with many characteristics of someone in their pre-teen years (see our homepage to read more about our family). However, he has been able to overcome many challenges including graduating from high school (at the age of 18) and holding the same job for over 20 years. He loves to travel, swim, scuba dive, play Nintendo, bowl and collect all kinds of miniature cars.. He lives at home with my wife and I and has his own private suite. One of the features of his room is a HO scale train set that runs completely around two adjoining rooms complete with highways, buildings, etc. One of his favorite past times is  playing video games, with his city full of cars, and watching movies…

In 1999, Stephen went into the hospital for a minor surgical procedure where he contracted a stapf infection (MRSA) in his blood stream that unfortunately left him near death. But by God's grace and many, many prayers, he did survive. However, due to a loss of circulation to his extremities from some heavy medications given to him, they had to amputate both of his legs and all ten fingers which we thought for sure would leave him incapacitated for life.. Well, within 3 months of being released from the hospital, Stephen was up on his brand new prosthetic legs dancing the New Years in with a cute young lady in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, and he hasn't looked back yet. Overall, he is a remarkable young man!

Now, for his car Herbie. Like we said earlier, the car is a 1965 Volkswagen, Type 1 sedan with sunroof. Although the original Herbie was a 1963, there is little difference in the two cars from the outside. The turn signals are slightly larger and are yellow vs. clear, and the rear tag light housing is bigger. Other than that, it's hard to tell them apart. In fact, Walt Disney used many different cars and various years in the multiple movies that they made. So we didn't feel too bad using this car as a starting point. We purchased the car in 1997 and have fixed it up slowly over the years. The latest work on the car was a complete restoration from the ground up. In addition, Stephen's Herbie actually has a brain that allows it to do a number of things on it's own such as opening and closing his own doors and hood, turning on and off the headlights, turn signals and wipers, and randomly letting people know he is there by squirting them with his window washer or with oil (water) from his engine. His horn also sounds and he has both strobe lights and high density Halogen driving lights for night driving. On top of everything, he still has his original 40 HP engine and 6 volt electrical system.

In addition, after talking to Stephen we decided that Herbie needed some friends to keep him company so we decided to add a couple of lovable white bears and a dog to the show. Beauregard, Daisy and Duke (their dog) are also animated and they sit in front of Herbie at car shows, etc., and tell the complete story as to how they first met Herbie and helped fix him up to make a complete comeback. Of course Herbie and his friends add a little humor to the show by playing a few jokes on each other and playing some of Herb's favorite music.

We then took another step and gathered autographs from most of the stars from Herbie's four major movies. Not only did they autograph personal pictures of Stephen and Herbie together, but they also autographed Herbie's glove box door for everyone to see. And if this isn't enough, Walt Disney found out about ole Herb and decided they wanted to film him in action. So on February 26, 2002, Stephen and Herbie became stars when Disney invited them to Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida and made them a permanent part of their latest release of The Love Bug on DvD.

Well that's enough for now. We will try to include more detail on the following pages. If anyone cares to comment or to drop either Stephen or I a line, please feel free to do so using the feedback page.

If you would like to see a movie of Herbie in action along with Beauregard and Daisy as well as other featured videos, just click on the "Stephens Video" tab on the left hand side of this page...