Lincoln B Que
When I first started wholesaling cars, I bought four or five old cars from one dealer. I was only buying cheap cars and the most expensive one of the bunch was a Lincoln Versailles which was basically a Granada with a leather interior. I paid five hundred for it. The other cars were a hundred and two hundred dollar cars that I sold to a buddy who had a pot lot where he sold immigrant field hands cars for the picking season. I didn’t make much on them, maybe a few hundred bucks total. My profit for the deal, it seemed, would be the Lincoln which was really a nice clean car, good paint, nice interior, and it ran and drove good.
My partner and I knew exactly where to go sell it. We’d sold a couple of cheap cars to a new car dealer and he paid a lot of money for clean cars no matter how old for the dealer’s pot lot. The only problem is he was in a different city about forty miles away. We drove up there one afternoon thinking we’d sell him the Lincoln and then buy something from him to drive home.
We showed him the car and talked him into buying it, but he didn’t have anything he wanted to wholesale. So we drove it home with a promise to bring it back first thing in the morning. We made a pretty good lick on it.
On the way home, as soon as we got out of town, it quit running. I don’t remember the whole sequence, but I figured out if I pulled the gas line off from the side of the carburetor and off of the filter it was attached to on the other end squeezed it and blew it out, the car would start and run. We drove on and it quit again a few miles later. I did the operation again, twisting the little piece of hose that ran from a in-line filter and the carb. We got it home way after dark, but had to stop and repeat that operation a few more times.
The hose was old, like the car, and twisting it off and twisting it back on again made it start coming apart. I figured we’d go get a new filter and new piece of hose in the morning and then take it back to sell it. We parked in front of my partner’s house which is on a main four-lane boulevard for the night.
I came back in the morning, pulled in in front of the Lincoln and my partner got in our little jewel with a plan to drive to the auto parts store down the street and get some parts. I was feeling pretty good about the whole thing. We had a pretty good lick made on the Lincoln and along with the other cars we bought we had a pretty good day of business.
I was in my car waiting for Tom to start up and looking in my rear view. I saw him start the car and about a minute later I saw flames shoot out from below the front of the car. I got out and ran back, waving my arms and yelling for him to shut it off. Like always in situations like that the message doesn’t result in immediate action and it took Tom a bit to realize what I was yelling. He shut the car off finally but the flames were getting bigger fast. Smoke was billowing out of the seams on the hood and pouring out from the underside right there on the boulevard at 8 in the morning during the rush hour traffic.
My partner ran inside to call the fire department, no cell phones back then. They got there pretty quick, and put it out, but the car burned. The front engine area was completely burned, it melted all the wiring into the cab of the car and smoked the interior savagely. Even the dash board got warped and melted.
It was now a five hundred dollar smoking hulk of a wreck and my good day of business was a memory.
A kid about twelve or so with his backpack on headed to the school bus stop looked at me standing there and asked, “Your car burned up?”
No, no, there’s laws against beating up little kids. I just grunted.