Car sale a little strange at the time, and got even stranger 3 years later

Deadline time and no ideas. I have been so busy lately, leaving little time to think of a Good News story. As I write this, I am awaiting the arrival of an old friend who will be here until Thursday. That’s golf day, no time to write on golf day.

Come Friday, Editor Pat will be emailing me, reminding me he needs my column now. Too much pressure. So, let me tell you a story and then I gotta run.

I once tried to make a list of all the cars I’ve bought and sold. I figure it to be 75.

Most have been classics and most of those classics have been convertibles. I love cars, always have. I can even remember the day that love affair began — Oct. 11, 1956.

You couldn’t buy a car in our town so Dad made arrangements with the closest dealer to meet us halfway. I cannot tell you how excited I was. He was trading in the family’s Vauxhall (The one with the turn signals that popped out of the doors). As a family of eight, it was impractical for all of us to make the trip in a Vauxhall. I don’t remember how many, or which ones of us got to go, but I know I was there.

We came home with a brand-new Meteor Rideau. It had plastic seat covers, which never got removed because my mom believed they’d wrapped those seats for a purpose and she knew what that purpose was. Six kids worth.

God, how I laugh when I think of that. We could never convince her those seat covers were supposed to come off. That car was as neat and clean the day my father traded it in as the day he bought it.

OK, we’re halfway done here and I haven’t even touched on what I set out to write about.

This column is actually about the only truck I ever owned. 74 cars, one truck — a 1948 Chevy Panel delivery truck with no back windows, no side windows. Fully restored when I bought in Westbank.

It was a beautiful chocolate brown on pastel yellow. Gee, it was gorgeous. Several years earlier I had bought a 1957 T-Bird that I kept for 16 years.

I didn’t drive the truck much because every day that was nice enough to bring it out, was also a nice enough day to drive the T-Bird. So I decided to sell it (I wish I hadn’t).

A fellow from North Bay, Ont., saw it advertised in the Classic Car Trader, called me, asked a bunch of questions and we settled on a price.

I had bought it for $11,000. He paid $18,000. He said he’d send “his guy” to pick it up.

He sent him on a Greyhound bus, with $18,000 cash in his pockets. When “his guy” arrived in Penticton, he told me he’d never been so scared in all his life sitting on a bus for five days with 180 hundred-dollar bills in his pockets. I would guess so. I thought he was coming with a closed car carrier.

But I’ll bet his trip back to North Bay was more horrifying than his trip out. It was April, the truck had bias-belted tires on it and there are many mountain ranges between here and Ontario. (For the uninitiated, bias-belted tires pitch and roll and make for challenging, often treacherous, driving).

If I had known he was going to drive it home, I would have equipped it with steel-belted radials and raised the price to 20 grand.

Three years later I get a call from the buyer. He asks me if I’ve seen his truck. I didn’t understand the question. He said he was moving to Florida because of the “Communist Canadian federal government.” He said he had come back for the truck and it wasn’t where he left it, and did I have any idea where it went? I was stunned.

It finally dawned on me that he thought I came to Ontario and stole the truck back.

I guess I should have realized he was fighting mental health issues when he sent a guy across the country on a bus with 18 thousand dollars in his pockets. I hung up on him.

Fred Trainor is a retired broadcaster living in Okanagan Falls. Email: fredtrainor@shaw.ca