I bought the car--- sight-unseen ---in 1983 from a good friend's brother who lived in rural Illinois near St. Louis, MO. I flew from Charleston SC to St. Louis, then took a puddle-jumper to the local airport.



The owner was conflicted. He loved the car. It was in the barn under a cotton cover. He only drove it on sunny days with no chance of rain. He washed it after every time he drove it. If he wouldn't have time to wash it afterward, he simply wouldn't drive it. He told me he had never driven it on a wet street; nor, he told me, had the previous owner.



But he had children who were getting old enough to go out and play in the barn. His future brother-in-law had recently opened the driver door into one of the barn's wooden pillars (the slight wrinkle forward of the handle remains to this day). He knew he needed to move on and not have to endure the stress of owning a perfect Porsche in a world that was clearly NOT perfect.



I can't remember how long John said he owned the car, but he bought it from the original owner. He retained all the ordering documents, receipts and period sales literature. I remember the options as being the wooden steering wheel, headrests, 5-guage instrument cluster, gasoline heater, Talbot mirror, Hella driving lights. The car had 38,000 miles on the odometer. It was sweet.



I drove it home via Chicago, where my own brother lived. I noticed the performance was not what I had expected. Fast, sure, but not blistering. I adjusted my route to South Carolina through the Great Smoky Mountains so I could enjoy some happy time on the kind of road one finds between Knoxville and Charlotte. 



When I got back to Charleston, I found Deutschland Motor Works, the shop of Ed Smith, preeminent Porsche mechanic in the Low Country. He had been a member of the (a?) Porsche racing team. When I pulled into his shop, he was out to lunch, but the staff saw the car and said, "You'd better wait for Ed."

When Ed returned from lunch he looked over my newly acquired car.
He opened the driver door and asked, "Is this all original"
I said it was.
He said softly, "God damn."
"Those the original miles?"
Yep.
Again, "God damn."
He pulled the trunk lid latch and went back to look.
He looked in, then looked up at his staff.
"No one touches this car. It's all mine."



Ed let me watch as he worked his magic. The first thing he wanted to do was replace the tensioners with a set from a 930 (said they were more reliable).
For the final carb set-up, he used a UniSyn to do his initial synch on the Webbers.
Then he said to me, "Watch this:"
He put his forehead on the engine lid as he dialed in his exact final adjustments to the jets on each throat, using the vibrations as feedback.



Remember that I wasn't so impressed with the performance of my new car?

When I paid and left Ed's shop, I punched it. It was as if I had two more cylinders behind me. The glove box door, which is held in place by a magnet, fell open under the acceleration and the contents shot directly into the passenger seat. The smile on my face as I sat behind the wheel hasn't left with each subsequent drive.



In Charleston, I stored it in a Public Storage Unit. Over the next 5 years, I drove it on nice weekends. It waited for me to come back from my submarine patrols. When I moved to Florida, it was in my two-car garage. When I moved again, I put it inside a rented Ryder Truck, packed my things around it and drove it to California.



About 6 months later, I had taken the car on a road trip to LA to see a friend who was working in the film business. He convince me to stay for a few months and help him do the sound editing on a feature film (Aloha Summer). I came out of the studio one evening to find my car gone! Some idiot had thought it was new, so he had what must have been the easiest hot-wire of his life. For some reason, he couldn't unload it, and to his misfortune, the clutch was severely worn. He stood out like a sore thumb, tooling about downtown LA at night, when all real Porsche owners were at home in Palos Verdes or Pacific Palisades. Miraculously, my car was returned undamaged in three days, minus the contents of the trunk ---all the original sales literature, sales and repair receipts, the two-volume original workshop manuals and my grandfather's golf clubs.



I got a job with an start-up automobile manufacturer with offices in the San Francisco Bay Area (anyone remember LaForza?)

My friends at a car shop in Oakland agreed to store my 911; they fork-lifted it up onto a shipping container in the shop area, so it wouldn't be in danger from activity on the shop floor (the owner had a REAL AC Cobra, so he understood these things . . .). My daily driver was a shabby-but-strong '66 912. The 912 turned out to be a fortunate acquisition, because aside from the engine, it was the same car as a 911. If I had any procedure or exploration to do on the 911, I tried it first on the 912, thereby avoiding irreversible disasters.



Before I left the San Francisco Bay area, I had a mechanic named Sam Sipkins look the car over. He was a renowned 356 guy in Oakland whom I knew because of my 912. Sam recommended a rebuild on the 911. The cylinders had a strange wear pattern. I remember shelling out $600 (in 1995 dollars) just for a set of sodium-filled valves. That rebuild has fewer than 2000 miles on it.



Disaster struck in 1995 as I merged into stop-and-go traffic on the connector from 580 to 880. I guy in a Lexxus behind me wasn't paying attention and allowed a big gap between us (I should have known: I used his previous attention gap to merge into the traffic). He sped up, thinking the newly opened distance meant traffic was moving. I saw him in my rear-view mirror, realized he was not going to see me in time, pulled over to the left as far as I could (no break-down lane!) and could only watch his mindless advance in horror.



He saw my tiny brake lights too late, plowed into my right bumper and drove me into the guard rail, just kissing the car in front of me (see the shallow vertical dent on the trunk lid). I estimate his speed between 3 and 5 mph. It was enough to break my heart. The rear quarter panel was pushed under (see the photos), deforming the metal slightly as it rotated down around a point at the back of the rear quarter window. The front left was driven into the guard rail, breaking the headlight, fog light, turn signal and horn grille.

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In 1996, my life took me to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba with my new Navy wife, so the car went into storage. When we left Gitmo after 4 years, the car went into my two-car garage in Pensacola--- we drove a Cherokee and a minivan.

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Two years later, the car went back into storage at KarHouse in Pensacola as we left for Japan. That was October of 2001. It is there today.