I was manager of a small Honda dealership in the nineties. We were in a small town about sixty miles from the bigger city. We started an ad campaign in the bigger city. And I sold cars on the phone to people from the big city and called it the Honda Hotline. I quoted prices right over the phone, usually a few hundred over invoice and guaranteed the price to the penny including all the fees, “Not a penny more, not a penny less.” We started getting into the big city Honda guy’s market in a big way. Dealers didn’t do that kind of dealing back then. I also delivered cars to customer homes or business.
I sold a car to a guy in the big city one day. He wanted a special hard-to-get-car. I had to trade another dealer for it and I did. I think it was a red Accord Coupe six cylinder when it was just released. And I told him I would personally deliver it to him if he liked. I don’t think he really believed me. My price was a thousand over invoice and he’ already been kicked out of the big city Honda store for trying to get them to do the same, and they told him that I was lying.
I did the whole deal over the phone, except for signing the paperwork. He was paying me cash, so I printed a contract and faxed it to him to peruse and took a credit card deposit to go get the car. He asked if I was gonna try and sell him an extended warranty or anything else. I told him we didn’t even have a finance office and if he wanted any extras, warranties, or insurance all he needed to do was ask me for it. He liked that a lot.
I had a trailer and a truck and I delivered the car to his house. He lived outside of the big city in the country. It was early evening when I found his place. It was in the woods down a long drive where there were four or five huge custom homes. I was thinking he lived in a really nice area. His drive was gated and I had to ring the bell to get in. The other homes on the road were nice customs, but his place was a real estate. He had a small lake in the font and a jungle hid the house. There was a huge barn to the left of the house. Most of the house was buried, the front looked like a regular house with a huge double front door that was at least ten feet high, but the main part of the house was down a few steps from the foyer and half buried in the ground.
The front door was heavy rosewood planks, nicely stained and adorned with heavy brass bright-ware and stained glass windows. When he opened the door to greet me, I realized I felt like I knew this guy pretty well from our various conversations and I was pretty much right on the money. He was in his fifties, slender, in excellent shape, and dressed “expensive casual.” We went out to look at the car. I had him ground guide me to back the car off the trailer and he turned on all his floodlights in the front and we looked it over. He was happy and we went inside and got him all signed up and I got his check.
We did our business at his dining table in a dining room that was castle huge. The table was heavy wood and beautiful. He told me it was custom made for him out of rosewood. He also had a collection of nice looking old guitars everywhere. And they were mostly Martins. I’d not really asked what he did for a living, he’d told me he was an importer, but now I did ask him what he did to afford all what he had. He told me he bought wood and imported it for Martin Guitar Company. Rosewood from India. And that was it, no baubles, trinkets, or even other kinds of wood. Just rosewood and just for Martin.
So, I tried to engage him about guitars. He told me he didn’t play music and didn’t know anything about any of the guitars he had. I told him I was a musician and exclaimed about the old HD-45 he had hanging on the wall in the foyer and I told him I had a rosewood Martin. He asked me if I wanted to see what his business was all about so I followed him to his barn. It was a huge barn. And it was full with bundles of rosewood planks about three feet long, floor to ceiling and all the way to the back of the building. There were three or four aisles that reached into the depths where the front lights didn’t shine. The smell of all that wood was strong and heady.
All of that wood was for Martin Guitar Company. He personally picked all the wood on yearly trips to India and then shipped and stored and cured it at his place until Martin called needing rosewood. He’d been doing it for twenty-five years, they bought every scrap he brought back and he said all that wood would be gone in ten months when he was scheduled to make another buying trip.
I was curious how a guy who wasn’t really into music or guitars could wind up with a job like that. He said he stumbled into a deal on rosewood when he was a young guy traveling around the world being a bum. He bought a bunch of wood and shipped it back to California, he thought, to sell it to a furniture builder. Somehow in his dealings, he found out rosewood was a very popular wood for guitar builders and he contacted Martin. That started his career as a rosewood buyer.
I suppose you are wondering, and I did too; why would a wood buyer guy with acres of forest, a mansion, a barn full of expensive wood, not to mention all the priceless guitars hanging on the wall, buy a Honda? It was for his secretary/girlfriend. He had the Mercedes AMG and Bimmer 750 in the garage.
He told me he’d never believed this car deal was going to happen as it did. He was happy. I was trying to figure out how I could get the old HD-45 off the wall and into my truck. It had pearl inlay everywhere.