Indigenous, autistic and non-verbal young man has an amazing artistic ability that celebrates his love of cars
Ethan is indigenous, autistic, largely non-verbal and has had a love affair with cars since he was a very young child. Mike Mandin adopted Ethan at age six when he saw on a B.C. government website that the boy loves cars. Mike does too. Ethan has graduated from high school and is now enrolled in an adult day program. But his happy time is spent at Wayne’s Toy Box, the hot rod shop where his father works near Errington, a 30-minute drive from the Nanaimo ferry terminal on Vancouver Island.
Ethan loves to build model cars, trucks, buses and even walkers by making a three-dimensional drawing on a single sheet of paper and then folding it into exact replicas. He has made more than one thousand of them. He remembers every detail of a vehicle he sees and then makes an exact three-dimensional model. Somehow, he memorizes everything about a vehicle from the outside to the interior and even the underside. Then he creates a colourful model.
“I took him to Vancouver International Auto Show and he saw a truck wrapped for the Vancouver Canucks with all kinds of signage and messages. He came home and made that truck down to the last detail,” Mike says.
Ethan proudly displays an exact model of Mike’s 1932 Ford pickup hot rod. The vehicles he draws on paper are folded into replicas of cars, trucks and buses. His models include an exact replica of the DeLorean from Back To The Future along with other notable vehicles he has seen on television or in photos. Many of the vehicles he makes or so tiny they appear small when displayed on a fingertip. “He has an incredible memory for detail,” Mike says about Ethan, one of two autistic children he has adopted as a single father.
Mike takes his adopted son to car shows on Vancouver Island and, after he returns home. Ethan makes models of the cars he has seen. One of them was an exact replica of a GMC pickup he had seen with a white Chevy tailgate. “Ethan made a model of a pickup truck owned by a man who was being moved from a hospital to a hospice. All the dying man wanted to take with him was the model that Ethan had made. It was very touching,” Mike says.
A trip to the Old Time Drags at Mission Raceway Park resulted in Ethan making models of the Pro Mod race cars he had seen there. After a ferry ride, Ethan made a large paper model of the ferry and then filled it with 300 of his miniature paper cars.
He taps out words on an electronic device and uses an iPad to see what the underside of vehicles look like so he can draw that into his paper models.
When he graduated from high school, he drew pictures of all the teachers’ cars and gave them out as presents. He is now making models of electric cars and has completed 21 Tesla models.
“Ethan is so good with his hands,” Mike says. “He can make exact replicas of cars out of paper, folding them into shapes that are so tiny it is hard to see all the detail he puts into them. He loves doing it and he just doesn’t stop.”
Alyn Edwards is a classic car enthusiast and partner in a Vancouver-based public relations company. [email protected]
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