I thought this story, which I had heard from just one person, sounded too good to be true, so I asked readers if they had heard it. It reminded me of the legends about people who have neighbors involved with organized crime, who are able to retrieve some valuable stolen property for them just by making a phone call.
A student in Oregon had sent my original version of “The Unstealable Car.” He had heard it told about someone’s lovingly restored Corvette.
A man has this classic sports car that he labored for years to restore to mint condition. He keeps it parked in his garage with the wheels on cardboard sheets, taking it out only on special occasions and in perfect weather.
Fearful of thieves, he devises a foolproof way to secure his treasure. He has thick steel staples sunk into the concrete of the garage floor, and he attaches the car using heavy chains passed through the staples and around the car’s frame and secured with several locks.
The car is thus parked and locked, facing into the garage, and covered with a tarp.
The next time he removes the tarp preparing to drive his sports car, he finds the vehicle still solidly chained down and locked—but now facing outward. Under a wiper blade is this note: “If we want this car, we’ll take it.”
The lesson:
No matter how we contrive to foil thieves, the true professionals among them can easily outwit us. And even thieves take pride in their work and have a sense of humor about it.
The first part of the story, I suppose, is believable enough. But the second part depends on two suspicious
twists. Would thieves go to the trouble of bypassing such safeguards just to shift the car’s position? And would they risk capture by leaving such a note?
Following my query in the column, several people in the Midwest sent me versions of “The Unstealable Car.” Each was a little different from the others, and although all of the respondents had been told that the story was true, the sources were merely friends of friends. None of them sent me reliable evidence of the story’s authenticity—a copy of the note, say, or a news clipping describing the event.
V.R. of Hobart, Indiana, wrote that she distrusted the story, when she heard it from an English professor at Purdue University a year ago. The teacher claimed to know someone who knew the person to whom it happened.
In this version, a visitor from the South leaves his fancy sports car overnight on a dead-end street in the Gary-Hammond, Indiana, area, because the person he is visiting has no garage. He parks the car at the end of the street, closely surrounded by other cars. In the morning, he finds his car turned around, with the note on the windshield.
But R.W., in the same region of Indiana, recounted a version of the story told by an insurance agent who declined to insure R.W.’s new Corvette because he lacked a garage for it. This time the sports car was said to have been parked tightly between two other vehicles, plus chained down solidly to heavy staples in the concrete paving. All to no avail, of course, since all three cars are rearranged overnight with the locks reclosed, and the usual note is attached.
A third reader in the same region located the incident precisely in lot No. 40 of the Inland Steel Company at the East Chicago Works. He said that the event supposedly
took place “back in the 1970’s.”
Each day this Corvette owner parked his car in the last row of the lot, chained it to a guard rail, and set a burglar alarm. Coming out of work one day, he found the car still in place, but with the chains and locks lying on the front seat along with a note, “If we want it, we’ll take it.”
Since these versions come from the northern Indiana-Illinois area, they may stem from an actual incident in the region. But none has come to my attention in the course of my research.
M.R., reading my column in the Milwaukee Journal
, knew a variant attributed to the region. A friend in Chicago had heard it from someone who supposedly lives in the neighborhood where it happened.
In this version, yet another Corvette is parked each day in the street, locked and safeguarded by seven different alarm systems. But despite these precautions, one morning the car is found parked across the street, facing the other way, and decorated with a note that I don’t need to quote.
I received only one response that placed the incident elsewhere (though still in the Midwest) and also introduced a significant variation. J.C. of Warrenville, Illinois, remembers hearing the story in 1976 in Milwaukee.
A graduating high-school student got a new Corvette as a present from his parents and, fearing thieves but lacking a garage, parked the car each night wedged tightly between two large trees in his yard. He supposedly had to jockey the car back and forth twenty-two times to fit it in.
Then he chained and locked the car to the trees using the largest size available of key-operated Masterlocks (a Milwaukee company).
But one day he came out to his car to find it facing the wrong way and with a note under the wiper blade: “When we want it, we’ll come and get it.
”
A story similar to all of these appears to have originated in the East, casting doubt on the possibility of an actual Midwestern event underlying the story.
S.K. of California recalled a story she heard in New York City some fifteen years ago about a woman who had elaborately burglar-proofed her midtown Manhattan apartment. One day she returned home to find all her furniture rearranged. Nothing was missing, but she found a note that read, “If we want to get you, we will.”
In this version the threat is a personal one. The discovery of the moved furniture conjures up the fear anyone might feel when spotting clues that an unknown person has entered his or her property.