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A Blind Date, and a Car That Came With It
Ray Kopczynski‘s introduction to Saab began, by his own account, with a blind date rather than a showroom visit. According to a June 2024 “Behind the Wheel” segment produced by Oregon television station KPTV/Fox 12 and reported by Tony Martinez, Ray was set up on a blind date in Virginia by a friend who had recently married one of his own friends. Ray has recalled asking that friend’s husband why he had been chosen for the match, and being told, simply, that it was because of his height.
Ray’s date was Pat, a librarian several years his senior, at a point when Ray was still in his early twenties. Whatever reservations either of them may have had did not last: Ray proposed six weekends after the two met, and, according to the segment, they married six months to the day after their first date. The couple’s wedding date can be placed at October 16, 1971, based on a 2021 report in the Albany Democrat-Herald and Corvallis Gazette-Times that put their 50th anniversary on that date, a figure consistent with the KPTV segment’s reference to a 53rd anniversary approaching in October 2024.
Matching Saabs, Matching Lives
Pat came into the relationship already owning a Saab: a brand-new 1970 Saab 96 finished in medium blue, according to the KPTV segment. Ray has said he fell for both his future wife and her car at roughly the same time, and has described that as the point at which what he calls “the Saab story” began for him personally.
The Democrat-Herald/Gazette-Times profile, published in 2021, adds a further chapter to the matching-car narrative: it reports that Ray later arranged to buy a second example of the same model at a different national Saab convention, then surprised Pat with the keys during the event’s closing banquet, resulting in the couple driving home in matching Saabs. That 2021 report describes the couple as owning three Saabs at the time, including a 1972 station wagon. The 2024 KPTV segment, by contrast, refers to a pair of Saabs as “all we had for 50 years,” and identifies the newest car in the couple’s collection as a 1974 Saab. The two accounts are not straightforwardly reconcilable on the exact composition of the Kopczynskis’ fleet at any given time, and the discrepancy has not been independently resolved for this article.
Proving His Faith in Saab: A 6,400-Mile Round Trip
Ray’s most publicly documented Saab exploit remains the cross-country drive SaabPlanet covered in 2021: a round trip from Albany, Oregon, to Albany, New York, undertaken in a 1965 Saab 96 with its original three-cylinder, two-stroke engine, to attend that year’s national Saab convention. The Democrat-Herald reported the round trip at roughly 6,400 miles, and quoted Ray describing brutal heat and humidity on the eastern legs of the journey, along with a muffler failure west of Three Forks, Montana, on the return leg. Ray received the event’s Long Distance Award and a People’s Choice award in the 95/96 category, per that report.
The KPTV segment frames the same trip as a deliberate test of Ray’s confidence in a brand that, by 2021, had been out of production for well over a decade, with no manufacturer-backed dealer or service network remaining in the United States. Ray has said he relied on other Saab owners he could reach along the route for help rather than any factory support.
Retirement for the Car, Not the Marriage
The 1965 Saab 96 that made the cross-country run has since been retired to the Saab Heritage Museum USA in Sturgis, South Dakota, according to the KPTV segment – a volunteer-run, nonprofit collection of more than 100 Saabs that SaabPlanet has profiled separately. Ray has said he would not trade the experience of the drive itself, while adding that he would not repeat the trip.
Ray continues to serve on the Albany, Oregon, city council, a role referenced in both the 2021 and 2024 coverage. The couple are also identified in the KPTV segment as volunteers at the Historic Carousel & Museum in Albany, a detail echoed in a related Facebook post from that organization.
Still Saab, 53 Years On
Whatever the exact count of Saabs in the Kopczynski garage at any given moment, the throughline across both the 2021 and 2024 coverage is consistency: a marriage now in its sixth decade, conducted almost entirely in the company of a Swedish car brand that stopped building cars in 2012. As the KPTV segment puts it, the Saab has functioned as something closer to a shared language between them than a hobby – one that, in Ray’s telling, has held for as long as the marriage itself.
