PIERCE, NEB. — For decades, a 10-acre tangle of trees in the corner of a corn and soybean field did its best to hide the legends of Pierce County.
But word got out. You could see a few of the cars from County Road 854 and a few more from the second green and third tee of the neighboring golf course. The sheriff lost count of how many times he was called to the farm to roust radiator thieves or chrome scavengers, and to chase away tire-kickers. “They were parked in the trees, door handle to door handle, bumper to bumper,” Deb Bruegman said as she served beers in the clubhouse of the nine-hole course. “The trees grew up in and amongst and around them.” Still, few people were prepared for what emerged from the woods in late July, when a construction crew uprooted the cottonwoods, maples and ash trees and carried their mostly hidden treasures into the sunlight. Rearranged nearby in nine neat rows, each longer than a football field, were nearly 500 cars and trucks including American classics from the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s: Bel Airs and Corvairs, Apaches and Impalas, even a Corvette Pace Car model. All were the legacy of Ray Lambrecht, the local Chevrolet dealer for 50 years until he retired in 1996. Now 95, he and his wife, Mildred, 92, still live across the street. The Lambrecht collection includes about 50 so-called survivors, cars still considered new despite their age. They were never sold, never titled and, with fewer than 20 miles on their odometers, barely driven. The best of these were stored indoors. While many of these new-old cars still have shipping plastic on the seats, their windshields are layered with decades of grime and bat droppings. There’s a 1958 Chevy Cameo pickup with 1.3 miles. A ’64 Impala with 4 miles. A ’77 Vega with 6 miles. A ’78 Corvette — the Indy Pace Car — with 4 miles. Among those who buy and sell vintage cars, there is a special thrill in unearthing a “barn find” — a car tucked away in good condition and largely forgotten, only to surface years later — and the trove here is surely one of the largest such discoveries. “To a collector, it’s a field of dreams,” said Yvette VanDerBrink, the Minnesota auctioneer who plans to sell the collection on Sept. 28-29 after a day of previews. Authorities in Pierce, a town of 1,700 125 miles northwest of Omaha, are bracing for the arrival of up to 10,000 bidders and spectators whose appetites have been whetted by news reports, online chatter and tantalizing photos of dusty Chevys. Ms. VanDerBrink called the collection an urban legend — albeit a rural one — come true, the rare white buffalo of car auctions. By Thursday, over 700 bidders had registered from 50 states and several countries; more than 800 potential buyers had already bid $500,000 online. “To find untouched cars is truly the holy grail,” she said. “There’s a lot of mystery here.” But there was nothing mysterious about the origins of the collection. In 1946, Army Sgt. Ray Lambrecht returned to Nebraska from the Aleutian Islands and married Mildred Heckman. They’d met six years earlier, when his brother married her cousin, but delayed their own wedding until the end of World War II. Mr. Lambrecht went to work for his uncle, Ernest Lambrecht, at the Lambrecht Chevrolet Company in Pierce. He built the house where he and Mildred live, and he built a new dealership — its grand opening announced by elephants wearing Chevrolet banners. Not long after, when Ernest Lambrecht fell ill, the newlyweds took over, developing an unusual business model and a novel retirement plan. “He loved to sell new cars,” Ms. VanDerBrink said. “He didn’t sell his trade-ins — he wouldn’t let you buy them. You had to buy the latest and greatest Chevrolet.” Mr. Lambrecht didn’t finance his inventory; he bought cars outright from Chevrolet, according to his daughter, Jeannie Lambrecht Stillwell, who lives near Orlando, Fla., and serves as family spokeswoman. When the latest models were trucked in, her father stored the new cars he hadn’t sold and stocked up on those he thought would eventually become valuable.
Read More: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/automobiles/collectibles/in-nebraska-a-field-of-low-mileage-dreams.html?ref=automobiles
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