Lost & found
When groups of enthusiasts get together, they often reminisce about forgotten cars they’ve heard about in barns and stables. Usually, however, a lost Bugatti turns out to be an Austin Seven special. Or that veteran car is an old carriage.
Yet for Adolfo Massari of Pennsylvania, these stories are all worth following up, particularly when he heard of several cars that had been in a New York underground car park for four decades. Many phone calls later, his firm LBI (www. lbilimited.com) was in contact with the owner, who told the usual story: he had bought the cars to restore, but never got round to it.
He listed them as a 1937 Packard hearse, a 1937 Rolls-royce with a fine body and a 1938 Delahaye cabriolet. The trio turned out to be in the underground parking lot of a nondescript industrial building in the middle of Long Island.
Once the cars were back in Philadelphia, work began on researching their past. The Packard was as described, with coachwork by the Silver Knightstown Body Company of Indiana. It had been a hearse/ambulance and finished its years as a cemetery vehicle in Brooklyn. The Rolls-royce, still sporting its British EGJ 44 registration, was bought new by Sir Phillip Sassoon, a long-time member of Parliament. As purchased, it had been fitted with a Barker open body, and it is thought that the car was sold soon after Sassoon died in 1939. At some stage a stylish body by Franay was fitted, thought to have been the coachwork that the Parisian firm displayed at the 1937 Paris Salon. The car spent some years in Texas before moving to the east coast in around 1978.
The Delahaye was not a 1938 model but a 1948 135M, with coachwork by Belgian carrossier Vesters & Neirinck, and had been at the 1948 Brussels Auto Show. This firm, founded in 1923, built only seven car bodies after the war before concentrating on trucks. It is thought the Delahaye spent part of its life on St Martin in the Caribbean. It later passed through the hands of dealer Ed Jirst’s Vintage Car Store in New York, who sold it to its previous owner for just $350!
‘The owner of these cars had bought them to restore, but never got round to it’