1953 Chevy
I heard both days of this tale on a tiny radio station in Shenandoah, Pa. some time in mid 1977. I had been working in the Purolator Oil Filter plant in Ringtown ,actually between Krebs Station and Pattersonville, which is in a pleasant farming valley just north of Shenandoah. The radio station aforementioned is one of the few whose signal is strong enough to be received in this area.On the first day in reference, a lady called up and said she had her late husband's 1953 Chevy she wanted to sell on the Dutch Trader program. This was a program where private individuals could advertise items for sale, up to a certain dollar amount, for free, and they would be doing it live on the radio (well maybe with a 7 second delay, but close enough). He had died a few months previously and she could see no reason to keep it. She offered to sell it for $500. This was at a time when a 1953 Chevy was nearly a legal antique automobile in Pennsylvania, and $500 would have been an excellent price regardless of the vehicle's condition.
The next day a gentleman called the show and asked the host if he remembered the ad for the 1953 Chevy. The host replied that he indeed did and still had it on the list he kept in front of him on the air. The caller then said that the program really worked. He had called the lady and was given directions to her small farm somewhere near there in the country area. The lady told him that the Chevy was in the barn and would most likely be dirty and covered up with straw and who knows what else. Her husband had stored the vehicle at some point before he died and it hadn't been run in quite a while. When the caller got to the barn he could not believe his eyes. What the lady was selling for $500 and what he bought was a original, but not pristine after its stay in the barn, 1953 Chevy CORVETTE!
This was surely the find of the century. There had only been a few hundred 1953 Corvettes built and any one available at all would command a premium price.
Cheap El Camino
Our friend JoAnne had married Bruce in the late 1960s. Bruce was a car enthusiast who wanted nothing more than to restore a Chevy El Camino. An El Camino was a pickup truck built on a car platform, so that it had the general lines of the car on whose platform it was built, but had a pickup bed in the back. The Ford Ranchero was a Ford clone of the El Camino.On a drive through the Poconos at some point in the late 1960s, Bruce and JoAnne came across an El Camino against a barn on a small farm, nearly hidden by a huge snow pile. Stopping, they asked the farmer if the El Camino was for sale. They were told that it belonged to the farmer's son, and he was serving in Viet Nam at the time. The farmer offered to write and ask if the vehicle were for sale and took their name and phone number down.
A month or so later, they got a phone message that the farmer's son had written home and told his father to sell the El Camino and everything that went with it for $75. As the El Camino was little more than a shell, this seemed a fair price. When they went to pay and arrange to have it brought to their home, Bruce and JoAnne got the shock of their life. Everything that went with it included a new 350HP 327 Small Block Chevy engine that had never been uncrated. The engine was worth around $500 at that time.
No comments:
Post a Comment