These locals once restored Pierre Robert’s VW van, Minerva. Now, they want it to serve as a tribute to the late DJ.

On Friday night, it finally hit Rich Tornetta. He would never talk to Pierre Robert again. He wouldn’t hear his voice on the radio, or go to a concert with his friend, or swing by the station to pay him a visit.

Robert, a beloved host at WMMR-FM, died Oct. 29. He was 70 years old.

The DJ was unapologetically himself, a quirky hippie in a blue-collar city who emanated humor and happiness. To think that he was suddenly gone was hard to fathom.

Tornetta, a Norristown native, wasn’t a lifelong listener of Robert, who joined the station in 1981. But they had quickly developed a close friendship more than a decade ago, when a broken-down car brought them together.

As the former marketing manager began to reminisce over old photos and videos of Robert, one stuck out to him. It was an image of the DJ standing in a hallway, flashing his signature peace sign.

To Tornetta, it looked like his friend was saying goodbye. The photo brought him back to 2013, when they first met, after he and his coworkers fixed up Robert’s 1970s Volkswagen RV, Minerva.

They did the work for free, with the help of local artist Franny Drummond of Paint Zoo, who airbrushed a design on the outside. Drummond added ghostly renderings of some of Robert’s favorite musicians: Jerry Garcia, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and Jimi Hendrix.

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“These were all legends who were no longer with us,” Tornetta thought.

Why not add a portrait of Robert to the van, posthumously?

Drummond immediately agreed to the idea. They reached out to the higher-ups at WMMR, who expressed interest in making it happen.

“I think with people loving him and people loving that bus — he is the city," Drummond said. “It would be really special if we did that.”

Robert was born in Truckee, Calif., and spent his formative years in San Francisco in the 1960s and 1970s. He had long dark hair, wore tie-dyed shirts, and worked part-time at a local rock station, KSAN-FM.

In 1981, the station pivoted to country music. The aspiring DJ decided to uproot his life. He threw some belongings into the back of his white 1970s VW bus — named “Minerva,” after an eccentric woman he met with a penchant for chain-smoking — and drove 2,875 miles east.

(A budding relationship may have factored in as well).

Robert loved Minerva. Throughout his early tenure with WMMR, it was his everyday car.

He talked about the VW bus in the same way that he talked about his golden retriever, Lucy. It wasn’t a vehicle. It was a companion.

“There was Lucy, and there was Minerva,” said Jim Antes, director of sales at Beasley Media Group, the station’s parent company. “They were like his immediate family, those two.”

The DJ had many redeeming qualities; paying parking tickets was not one of them. The Philadelphia Parking Authority quickly took note of his piling fines and seized Minerva in the early 1980s. The van was sold for scrap shortly after.

Robert was devastated. He tried out a few other vehicles — including a car that he nicknamed the “Cosmic Glider” — but none compared to his cherished Minerva.

In 2001, the station decided to surprise him with a 1970s-era VW bus, “Minerva 2.0,″ in honor of his 20th anniversary at WMMR.

The DJ fell in love with this vehicle, too. But like the original Minerva, it also ran into trouble. The car was in “rough shape,” according to WMMR program director Chuck Damico, who found it sitting outside of an auto body shop in Lower Merion Township.

It badly needed a new engine and had a habit of leaking oil. When Robert drove the van across the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, he was unsure if he’d make it to the other side.

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“He would have to coast on the way down,” said Bill Burns, a former sales manager at WMMR, “and hope that he had enough speed just to get there.”

Over the next decade, the new Minerva continued to deteriorate. The station tried to get it repaired, but to no avail. It became unusable and sat outside WMMR, in the back lot, for years.

By 2012, a family of mice and wasps had moved in. The van had a gaping hole on the floor of the driver’s side, where you could look straight down and see the road. Robert joked that it was his “Flintstones Car.”

The owners of the building that lodged WMMR, located in Bala Cynwyd, did not find this as funny. Minerva was occupying a coveted parking spot and resembled something akin to a biohazard.

The management group threatened to have it towed, and it seemed like Robert was bound for another Volkswagen heartbreak.

Until some unexpected benefactors stepped in.

WMMR’s sales team had long considered working with CollisionMax, a family-owned company with 11 auto body repair shops in the tristate area. But they didn’t want to just pitch them on $100,000 worth of ad buys.

They wanted to pitch a creative partnership.

In the summer of 2012, the station came up with an idea. Jeff Smith, an account executive at WMMR at the time, suggested a multi-month marketing campaign — in conjunction with an ad buy — built around the restoration of Minerva.

WMMR and CollisionMax would document the van’s journey on social media every step of the way — from when the company received it to how it was fixed to the final reveal.

It would be less marketing, and more storytelling. And to emphasize that point, they brought the ultimate storyteller, Robert, to meet Tornetta, his father, Jim, and the rest of the CollisionMax board at their office in Feasterville.

Robert showed up late — or, as he called it, on “Pierre Standard Time” — in a flamboyant outfit, with a wide smile, Tornetta recalled.

“You talk about a fish out of water,” Antes said. “He walks in, and he’s going to the receptionist, ‘I love your hair! I love your desk! Oh, what a beautiful office!’”

For the next three and a half hours, Robert spoke from the heart. He talked about Minerva, and the new Minerva, and how much he loved both vans.

He wasn’t a salesman, but he listened intently to Jim Tornetta, the president of the company, and Pat Beavers, the COO, as they shared their perspective.

By the end of the meeting, CollisionMax and WMMR weren’t just business partners; they were friends.

“It was a big, classic, wooden boardroom,” Burns said. “Some place that Pierre did not belong. But when he walked out, everybody was hugging one another.”

CollisionMax offered to do the renovation for free (but did not know the extent of the damage). Workers picked up the van on a flatbed in July and transported it to the shop, only to realize it would need about $100,000 worth of repairs.

Nevertheless, Tornetta and his team threw themselves into the project. They swapped the VW engine — which was outdated and could not be replaced — with a Subaru engine, to improve its fuel efficiency and horsepower.

» READ MORE: ‘We’re all still in shock’: Reaction from Philly and elsewhere to the death of WMMR’s Pierre Robert

They cleared out the nests and the animals, fixed the holes in the floor, and gave it new brakes, a new sound system, and a new gas pedal.

Virtually every part of Minerva had to be repaired or replaced. This included the outside, which had a tie-dyed wrap that was faded and peeling.

CollisionMax reached out to Drummond, who makes custom airbrushed helmets for the Flyers’ goalies.

Like CollisionMax, he agreed to work for free.

“Pierre was such a loved, iconic guy,” Drummond said. “He truly was the voice of Philadelphia. He was the voice. And how do you not paint something for that voice?”

Added Jim Tornetta: “The more we got to know him, it was, forget the transaction. Forget the marketing. It became about him. He was genuinely a good-hearted man. We just came to love him.”

The finished van was meant to be a surprise, so Robert only stopped in the shop periodically. But he would shout-out Drummond on the air, joking that he hoped “Franny’s not messing up my bus right now.”

He would have Rich Tornetta as a guest on his show as well, to provide updates on Minerva’s progress. The DJ referred to CollisionMax’s employees as “the greatest people on Earth” and gave them far more airtime than they had expected.

“Pierre would say, over and over and over again, ‘I really love you guys,’” Tornetta said. “He would meet the guys that were working on Minerva. That was something that he didn’t have to do but chose to do. This wasn’t publicized. This was all private.”

The original plan was to unveil the new van in January 2013, at the Philadelphia Auto Show. But a rival collision company complained that it would be upstaged by the reveal and pressured the show to remove CollisionMax.

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Coincidentally, this rival company was also buying ads with WMMR. Robert found out about the whole ordeal and did not hold back.

“Pierre basically said it was very scummy what they did,” Tornetta said. “He didn’t care.”

CollisionMax decided to debut the new Minerva at the Philadelphia Home Show instead. Robert had given Drummond and Tornetta some loose guidelines. He wanted to dedicate the van to his two loves: music and his adopted city.

So Drummond did exactly that. He painted the Philadelphia skyline on the front of the Volkswagen, with Robert’s trademark “Greetings Citizens” beneath it.

He put the Grateful Dead dancing bears on each side, with visages of Garcia, Joplin, Morrison, and Hendrix. In big bubble font, Drummond wrote “93.3 WMMR ROCKS” and used metal flake paint on the top, to add some extra sparkle to the sunroof.

“So Pierre could stick his head out, and go, ‘Hey, citizens!’” Drummond said.

The back was all bumper stickers, painted on. Some represented his different stops: KSAN, WMMR, and, most importantly, Woodstock ’94.

Burns covered the van with a parachute that he borrowed from his children’s elementary school gym teacher, and the crowd began to count down from five.

Robert — a man not often speechless — could only say one word: “Wow.”

Jim Tornetta described it as an emotional event.

“It was like [Minerva] was a part of his life that had been missing,” he said. “And I believe it just restored a spirit in him that dated back to years ago.”

This was not the end of Robert’s relationship with the CollisionMax family. He continued to stay in touch with the Tornettas, inviting Rich and his wife to concerts around the city.

When Jim’s first cousin, Rich Brigidi, died in 2016, a photo of Brigidi and Robert was placed on his casket.

Brigidi was in charge of internal shop machinery at CollisionMax. He and Robert got to know each other during the renovation of Minerva. Shortly after his death, the DJ dedicated a block of music to his late friend.

Brigidi loved sports cars, so Robert chose songs about driving fast and life on the road.

“At that time, we weren’t paying anymore,” Rich Tornetta said. “You know what I mean? The thing was done.

“But he was still going on about what awesome guys we were and sharing stories [of my uncle]. It was so touching.”

This is how Tornetta will remember Robert. He was many things: a hippie, music lover, and free spirit. But at his core, he was a loyal friend, who elevated people in the city and beyond.

Now, it’s time to elevate him. Minerva is being stored at a garage in Hatfield. It’s unclear what Drummond’s portrait of the DJ will look like, or where it will be on the van, or when it will be painted.

But all parties agree that there is no better way to honor Philadelphia’s finest citizen.

“I think he would dig that a lot,” Damico said, “and I think listeners would appreciate that a lot, since he’s not available to do photos anymore. You can take photos with him on his van.

“We’re trying to figure out how to keep him a part of a lot of stuff that we do. It would only make sense to have him now incorporated into the van, as a tribute.”