Mark Elliott became acquainted with the old Porsche over the Thanksgiving holiday in 1972. The asking price was $1,500, and it was sitting in a Kansas City chicken coop.
When Elliot arrived there, it was very cold. He looked at the car—a 1959 Convertible D—and turned his nose up a bit. The car looked and smelled pretty rough—that’s what happens when something spends years inside a chicken coop. Soon, Elliott was invited into the owner’s house for a drink.
“Son, I don’t want to take advantage of you,” the owner said. “I’ll take $900 for the car.”
The price was right, though it took Elliott a while to de-poop the damn thing; at the time, he was just a young college student. “I’d been through eight or nine Porsche 356s at that point,” he says. “The cars were considered obsolete. We drove that convertible in snow storms with the top down because it was so cold that the back window would have cracked if we tried to assemble it.” Following graduation, he bought a 911.
Even though Elliott moved to Florida in 1974, restoration on the convertible began in Missouri. The white car was to be repainted in black lacquer, but halfway through the process, the restorer was killed in an auto accident.
It went from bad to worse: Mark Elliott bought this Porsche covered in chicken poop, drove the piss out of it, then parked it in his uncle’s hanger and covered it with pesticides to keep the rats out! MARK ELLIOTT
Elliott figured 42 years of hibernation were enough, so he dragged the rare convertible out of the hanger and to his Florida home for restoration. Hopefully. MARK ELLIOTT
The unfinished hulk and all its components were towed into Elliott’s uncle’s nearby airplane hangar, where it was covered with pesticides so rats wouldn’t take over (just don’t tell the EPA). The little Porsche was pushed into a corner and forgotten.
For the next 42 years.
During that time, Elliott’s uncle used every opportunity to remind his nephew that the car was still sitting in his hanger. “A tornedo came through the area a few years ago and damaged the barn, exposing the car to the elements,” he says. By 2013, enough time had elapsed, so Elliott hooked his trailer up to his truck and made the long trek from St. Petersburg, Florida, to Missouri, to pick up his long-idled Porsche project.
By this time, Elliott had become known as the Porsche Gypsy. At one time, he once owned 37 Porsche 356s that at one time or another had all sat in a field behind his house. “Believe it or not, I once found a 1955 Porsche 550 Spyder during a snow storm,” he says.
Of the convertible, Elliot says, “It was like my ’59 convertible had been slumbering all those years, just waiting for me to get working on it.” The Porsche has matching numbers, and because it was stored in a dry hangar with a concrete floor for four decades, the tub was still in good condition. Elliott said the car is complete down to every nut and bolt and top bow, and the pesticides had certainly helped keep the rat and mouse damage to a minimum.
“I still need to decide whether to complete the restoration that I started in 1974, or sell the car,” he says. “This Porsche is like a time capsule. And it’s been preserved with Missouri mud, which could be the best preservative known to man!”
