Rev It Up

In the cold, quiet hours of Thursday mornings, a crew of delivery trucks and vans fan out from the MacKenzie Market on upper State Street, where the big rigs from Orange County drop the paper, hot off the presses. The spot is a new one, but many of the drivers have put in the years, among them John Rose, who’s been getting up at 3 a.m. to fill Independent racks for going on two decades. But he’s used to that. A surfer since he was 13 years old in Belmont Shore, John once moved to Hawai‘i to surf, another early-morning occupation, making a living repairing Porsches in Lahaina. He’s still a fix-it guy — currently switching out his 1988 Corvette’s 350cc engine to a 250cc one. “You have to have an ear for these things,” he said.