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A Car Show for Caden, Who Would Have Loved It

ANN ARBOR, MICH. — Lance Bowles knew his son Caden loved cars, but he didn’t realize just how much until the summer when Caden was 6.

“This guy was driving by, and Caden said, ‘Hey, Dad, there’s an Isetta!’ ” Mr. Bowles said, referring to a rather obscure Italian-designed microcar from the 1950s. “The guy turned the car around and said, ‘Did he just call this an Isetta?’ He couldn’t believe it.”

Caden Bowles was, by all accounts, a smart, precocious and joyful boy with extraordinary ardor for automobiles. Though only 11 when he died last fall while awaiting a heart transplant, Caden left an enduring impression on nearly everyone his life touched, including the staff at the University of Michigan C. S. Mott Children’s Hospital here, and Jean Jennings, the well-known automotive journalist who runs the JeanKnowsCars website and is a judge on TruTV’s “Motor City Masters.”

Ms. Jennings’s friendship with Caden resulted in a car show in his honor, held at the hospital last Saturday. Largely unpublicized and closed to the public, Caden’s Car Show was intended to give young patients and their families a diversion from medical ordeals, and to raise awareness for organ and blood donations.

At Mott, 26 children await transplants. A dozen of them need heart transplants.

Held atop a parking structure on a sultry Saturday morning, the show featured nearly 60 cars — most of them privately owned — including classics, new models and novelties with child appeal. They included a 1922 REO Speed Wagon fire truck, a 1991 Ferrari Testarossa, a 2008 Lamborghini Reventón, a 1981 DeLorean, a 1975 Plymouth Fury police car, a 1930 Ford Model A and a 1925 Detroit Electric Model 95. A Mopar Muscle Ram monster truck and an Oscar Mayer Wienermobile sat at the valet entrance. The show required months of planning and had 16 sponsors, including several automakers.

Even Mark Reuss, General Motors’ executive vice president for global product development, joined the cause, driving to the hospital in his personal black 1954 Chevrolet Corvette from his home an hour away. “This was her first road trip,” Mr. Reuss said, smiling beside the car he had bought last year. “Jean asked me to come, and I said yes,” he explained.

Patients were brought out in wheelchairs, sometimes shielded from the sun by umbrellas. Alexander Mugg, 5, sat for a photo session inside a ’63 Corvair Greenbrier van that had been converted into a photo booth. Wearing a Detroit Pistons jersey, Alexander, who has cystic fibrosis, said he looked forward to the fire truck because he hoped to become a fireman.

Quentin Zanders, 17, of Roswell, Ga., had been in intensive care after an abdomen procedure, but hoped to go home soon. He grinned behind the wheel of a 1965 Shelby Cobra 427 owned by John and Ann LaFond of Plymouth, Mich. “I like the stripes,” said Quentin, who expects to get his learner’s permit this year. “It looks like the kind of car you’d see in a James Bond movie.”

Patients unable to leave the hospital could see the cars from their windows or watch a video feed. Indoor activities included a photo booth, slot-car racetrack and video games.

“I should tell my dad about this one,” said Gavin Grubaugh, 7, of the racecar he propelled around the slot-car track. “I drifted!” he exclaimed as his car went sideways, then shared a fist bump with his mother, Theresa Grubaugh of Standish, Mich. Gavin had gone through brain surgery a week earlier.

Each of Mott’s 350 patients received a bag of treats and toys, including Chevrolet trading cards and a Ford GT die cast model provided by Edsel Ford II.

The night before, an event at Zingerman’s Cornman Farms, a working farm and event venue in nearby Dexter, raised more than $50,000 for research on pediatric heart transplants and congenital heart disease. Called “Full Throttle,” after a name Caden gave to his written critiques and drawings of cars, the event featured a dozen vehicles, some owned by surgeons who had known Caden his whole life.

Caden was born with hypoplastic left heart syndrome, meaning his heart’s left side had failed to develop. He needed, and received, a transplant, and lived a relatively normal life. But at 7 he was found to have cancer linked to immunosuppressant drugs. He overcame the cancer, but last year his heart began to fail; after a few months awaiting a new one, Caden died of a stroke on Sept. 11.

Dr. Richard Ohye, head of the pediatric cardiovascular surgery division at Mott and the surgical director of the pediatric heart transplant program, brought his 1997 Ferrari 550 Maranello to the fund-raiser. Overcome with emotion, Dr. Ohye said of the event, “This is — I can barely speak.”

The weekend was conceived by Ms. Jennings and facilitated by Dr. Edward Bove, chairman of the cardiac surgery department of the university’s medical center. Ms. Jennings, whose cellphone screen saver is Caden’s picture, met the young enthusiast when he was recovering from cancer.

The friendship began with Meg Zamberlan, pediatric nurse practitioner and pediatric heart transplant program coordinator at the U-M congenital heart center. She had been astounded by her young patient’s sophisticated car chatter.

“He’d bring in this car encyclopedia, a foot and a half long, and he knew where each car was he wanted to talk about,” she said. “He had these long fingers and he’d point to this spec and that spec.”

She told a friend, who told Ms. Jennings, who wrote a column about Caden for Automobile magazine, where she was editor in chief at the time.

Last year, when she learned Caden’s heart was being rejected, she brought supercars the magazine was testing to the hospital. One time, Ms. Jennings brought an Aston Martin Vanquish and arranged for him to see it up close. “The nurses were putting him in his wheelchair, and the whole time he was having this erudite conversation about engine displacement,” she said. “He figured they were just taking him for another test. Then they rolled him outside. I told him, ‘Get out, go see it.’ ”

The next day, she brought an SRT Viper. “He got in the driver’s seat, and we arranged his little sweatshirt and socks and I took his picture,” she said. “Then I told him to push the start button, and he jumps about six inches out of his seat.” Soon, doctors began bringing their own cars.

Caden had many interests, including science, and especially the solar system. But most of all he loved his family and cars, and he didn’t have a favorite. “When he was very little, he used to wind up Matchbox cars and put them on our window sills and get at eye level and watch the wheels go around,” said his mother, Shannon. “His first words were “round, round.”

Caden grew up in Fort Wayne, Ind., with his sister and two brothers. When Caden was hospitalized, Mr. Bowles, an accountant, and Mrs. Bowles, then a part-time dietitian, often drove 2.5 hours to Mott. Caden, who dreamed of owning his own car company, to be called Bowleswell, had been hospitalized four months when he died. His eyes were donated, and his memory will live on through Caden’s Car Show.

“It’s humbling to think that Caden is the face of all this,” Mrs. Bowles said Saturday, adding, “It is his legacy, through this show, to help other kids going through what he went through.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section AU, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: A Car Show for Caden, Who Would Have Loved It. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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