| Confessions of a Car Collector | ||||
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January at "no reserve." The Cadillac did look gorgeous. I thought I’d get most of my money back. This was not to be.
The car sold for just over $13,000 on January 7, 1998. I had the car for almost 2 years and had never driven it for more than a few blocks. But I was relieved. At least I would not have to spend one more cent on it! III I had been looking for a Rolls-Royce Camargue, a custom two door coupe built from 1976-1987. After looking at a number over several years, I saw one advertised in "Hemmings," ("The Bible of the old car hobby"). It was located in California, reasonably priced and just the color I wanted, and had 40,000 miles with all |
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records: The present owner was a well revered older movie star who had bought it new in Beverly Hills. A broker was handling the sale. It sounded perfect. The broker raved about it, but there was a fly in the ointment. A prospective buyer was returning from Japan on Sunday to look at it a second time. On the broker’s instructions, I wired him a large deposit to hold the Rolls-Royce and said I would be there before the Japanese man looked at it again. (He assured me he’d return the deposit if I didn’t buy it).
I flew out to Los Angeles the following Saturday. To make a very long and comical story short (in retrospect) it turned out that the car was nonexistent. When the deposit was not forthcoming, I called the "broker" and found his telephone had been |
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disconnected. My attorney discouraged me from suing in California. "Chalk it up to experience," she suggested.
Old cars can be fun, and I love to look at them. I have disposed of all but a few not-very-expensive reliable favorites such as a 1949 DeSoto just like my first car and a 1961 Chevrolet Impala convertible, which can be easily serviced locally. I have been tempted to figure how much I’ve lost by buying collector cars over the years rather than putting the money in mutual funds, but I’m afraid there’s not enough Prozac in the world to deal with that, so I haven’t
 Click to view 43kb image of DeSoto |
| © R. J. Broselow, 1998 | Back to Techman Kanata IDEAS ||| HOME |||
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