| Confessions of a Car Collector | ||||
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magazine had owned it for fifteen years. (This turned out to be true.) "You’ll love it!"
I returned to the hotel room. "What did you get?" my wife asked, peering over her reading glasses. "Oh, you’ll see. Let’s get the kids (who were in adjoining rooms with their spouses), and I’ll show you." I drove them all to the auction in our rented van and showed them the Cadillac, which now was sitting rather forlornly in a field. One of the giant whitewalls was flat. The response was silence and dropped jaws all around. "Well, how about a little enthusiasm! Did you know the Pope had one just like it?" Even my very observant Roman Catholic daughter-in-law was nonplused, and muttered, soto voce, "Congratulations, Dad." The car did arrive the following |
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week, and a really careful inspection (what a wise person does before bidding) revealed major paint problems, pitted chrome requiring refinishing, and, oh yes, the car absolutely would not start.
 Click to view 57kb image of Cadillac A mechanically inclined friend looked at it, and said he doubted it had been driven for many years, the previous owner’s claims notwithstanding. Within a few months I had spent well over $10,000 on a paint job and chrome work. Despite a series of supposedly competent mechanics, no one anywhere near our city could keep it running for more than a day or two at a time. In desperation I called the national Cadillac-LaSalle Club "Technical |
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Adviser" for Cadillac V-16’s. He lives in Michigan and was very sympathetic. He said something to the effect that those late Thirties V-16’s were notoriously difficult to keep running. He said parts started breaking before the cars even exited the assembly line! This was not encouraging! And despite having over $35,000 in the car, it still had the incongruous black and white interior, which not even a self-respecting 1930’s gangster would have thought appropriate, and I dared not try to drive it anywhere for fear of being stranded. I contacted a reputable classic car dealership in Arizona. We shipped it out to him and for another sum of money he got it running.
Because of my inability to have the car serviced in Lubbock, I decided to sell it at one of the humongous car auctions in Scottsdale in |
© R. J. Broselow, 1998 | Back to Techman Kanata IDEAS ||| HOME |||
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