A friend of mine who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area recently bought her dream car—a mint condition year-old Chrysler LeBaron convertible with very low mileage. The reason why the car is in perfect shape, she told me, is that it had belonged to a Chrysler executive who used it only to drive homecoming queens around football stadiums and in parades.
You’d think I would know better, but I believed her story at first. I fell for that homecoming queen, forgetting all the urban legends I had collected about car bargains.
There’s the legend I call “The Death Car,” which describes a nearly new car that the owner sells cheaply because a deathly smell permeates the upholstery. And there’s the one I call “The $75 Porsche,” about a sports car sold for a song because the owner ran off with his secretary and foolishly trusted his wife to sell the car and send him the money.
Only after I had repeated my friend’s story a few times as an example of the ultimate car-dealer’s sales pitch did she admit that, yes, she had made up the part about the homecoming queens.
A bargain sports car and a made-up story also came together in a letter I received recently from Susan P. McKiernan of Medina, Ohio.
“In 1961, my brother told me about a new Corvette which was being sold for $500 because the owner was killed in it and the mother just wanted to get rid of it,” McKiernan writes. “I told my brother that this made no sense.” She was quicker than I in recognizing a legend. She reasoned that the mother would give
the car away,
not sell it so cheaply, or she would charge whatever figure was still owed the bank. Her sales offer would only have called extra attention to the death, further distressing the mother. And besides, the first person to hear of this deal would have snapped it up anyway.
“My brother, of course, called me an idiot,” McKiernan continues. “But in 1963 I heard the same story again. And my sister and I, thinking that we were the first to discover this phenomenon of traveling stories, made one up which came back to us in only two days.
“But my sister and I want you to know that we are retired from the business of inventing legends,” she concludes. “And I’m sorry to say that I can’t even remember now what story we created.”
I’m not surprised that you gave up the legend-inventing business. While there are a few instances of deliberately contrived urban legends passing into oral tradition, I’ve found that it’s much easier to collect and repeat urban legends than to make up new ones.
Incidentally, you scored perfectly in debunking the version of “The Bargain Sports Car” told by your brother. As all the flaws in its plot suggested to you, the story is apocryphal.
Yet, nearly thirty years later, the legend is still going strong. And the car involved is still nearly always a vintage Corvette.
In the most common version, an elderly woman whose son is missing in action in Vietnam wants to sell the old car he left behind. She asks just $500 for what turns out to be a 1967 Corvette that is stored on blocks of wood in her garage with all motor fluids drained. In other words, a real cream puff.
Sometimes the mother has called a car dealer to find out how much she should charge for a 1967 Chevy. Not realizing that she means a classic Corvette, the dealer suggests that she ask a few hundred dollars at most
.
Since it’s a legend based on wishful thinking, you seldom hear about anyone actually buying the car. The legend usually ends with the woman explaning the reasons for the unbelievably low price: after all, it’s a small car, and besides, it’s ten years old—so it can’t be worth much.
In the most poignant version I’ve heard so far, a man spots a newspaper ad offering a 1965 Chevy for $200, and he decides to take a look at it as a possible second car for his family. Just as he arrives at the address listed, he sees a beautiful vintage Corvette driving away. He asks the elderly lady who answers to his knock on the door if by any chance that was the car she had advertised.
“Oh, yes, that was it,” she says. “I sold it to the first person who answered my ad.”
None of the versions in my files report how the would-be buyer reacted.
You might guess that he has had nightmares ever since about missing the buy of a lifetime. I don’t believe he does. There are too many holes in this legend for it to be anything but a fantasy. But we can dream, can’t we?