Atlantic City, New Jersey's largest oceanfront
community, has been a lot of things over the
years: a top-end luxury resort for the
Northeast's truly wealthy, the birthplace of
American organized crime, a run-down,
crime-ravaged ghetto with a boardwalk, and over
the last 25 years or so, a newly uplifted gaming
paradise for the masses, who count for most of
the motorcoach volume (and crashes) on the
Garden State Parkway. In 2006, you can make a
strong argument that Atlantic City is more of a
family destination than Las Vegas is. After all,
while mama's frantically stuffing quarters into
what she hopes will be a jackpot payoff, you can
grab the kids and look at some cars.
G. Potter King has many years' experience
creating a mass-appeal auction, which takes
place in late February at the Atlantic City
Convention Center. This past year, both at the
convention center and at its one-night go for
premium cars at the Borgata casino-hotel, a lot
of cars got sold because the sellers agreed to
back off from what were clearly unrealistic
reserves. If the car didn't sell under the
gavel, it was off into the car corral, which got
bigger with each succeeding day. Once you
squeezed through the human gridlock of vendors
selling cheap Chinese-made tools, framed wall
hangings with signed memorabilia saluting
everyone from Tony Stewart to Tony Soprano, and
even the dude hawking magnetic bracelets he
claims will provide relief for everything from
arthritis to diabetes, you will indeed find a
vibrant car corral with something for everyone's
budget.
As an example, we offer this 1977 Chrysler
Cordoba hardtop, complete with opera windows,
from the days just before Lee Iacocca replaced
Ricardo Montalban as the company's pitchman.
We'd peg this as a No. 3 car, with neither
mileage nor asking price specified, The interior
wasn't ripped asunder, but the leather on the
driver's seat was worn in the places where the
driver would slide across the seat to get behind
the wheel.
Just the ticket for running to the bingo
hall, in other words.
We literally just about backflipped like Carl
Edwards as we moved deeper into the corral,
especially when we spotted this silver 1985
Chevrolet Camaro IROC-Z. If you never believe
anything else we publish, believe this: Back in
the Eighties, this was THE car that every
post-adolescent kid in New Jersey wanted to own
and drive hard. You'd see them in the parking
lots of strip joints, drag strips and the
Woodbridge Center mall. Most of these Camaro
IROCs were horribly abused, so finding one this
nice, with a claimed 89,000 miles, was
especially gratifying. The seller knew he had a
real survivor, and set the price at $12,500.
Barely two aisles away sat proof that you've
got to come to an auction with an open mind,
because you never know what's going to be there
to bop your consciousness askew. There was a
crowd around this tiny French car dubbed Le
Zebre and apparently built in 1914. In our
library, we have the all-encompassing
four-volume Encyclopedia of the Automobile
authored by Lord Montagu of Beaulieu and Nicky
Georgano, and that lavish tome makes no mention
of it. We dug deeper, but the best we could
manage was that Le Zebre, just outside Paris,
was a low-volume manufacturer of voiturettes
beginning around 1909. Its claim to fame today
was that Andre Citroën managed to snatch away
their chief engineer, a former French naval
officer named Jules Salomon. The best we could
tell about the well-worn corral car, still with
its original leather, acetylene tanks and lamps,
was that it was first shipped to an agent in the
Maritime Provinces of Canada.
We guarantee that you'll never be bored at a
G. Potter King sale, since so many of the lots
are delightfully off the wall. You can wade
through ranks of post-1972 Chevrolet Monte
Carlos, gen. 2 and 3 F-bodies, 1963 Oldsmobile
Cutlasses and muscle cars galore, and head home
with stiff legs but a smiling face ... oh, and
maybe a neat acquisition.
This article originally appeared in the JUNE
1, 2006 issue of Hemmings Motor News.
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