Porsche Tower: The old veterans bask in the Californian sun on three floors. There are said to be around 200 of the 356 model there, and they’re still counting.
How do stories come about? A reader writes to the author that it might be exciting to go to Los Angeles, where a junkyard is being auctioned off. The author happens to be in Los Angeles three days later, calls the auction house Sotheby’s and then finds himself in the junkyard. This is also quite nice because the owner, Rudi Klein, who died in 2001, hardly ever let anyone onto his property, and his two sons have never let anyone in since then. Now the journalist, who is a hardened car expert, is standing in 38 degree heat in front of a forbidding wall made of sheet steel in a slightly tense area not far from the airport, where, let’s say, you are perhaps not welcome as a foreigner, and he is amazed. All around him are car parts dealers of inferior quality and a wooden pallet business, desolate.
Starry sky: There used to be around 50 Mercedes 300 SLs there, says the son. A few whole ones are still there, and a few half ones too.
The son drives up in a golf cart in jeans and a T-shirt, old and dusty (the golf cart), with a broom and rake attached. The supposed caretaker looks after a few properties that his father has bought, but otherwise doesn’t want our conversation to be made public. We’re happy to stick to that and let the junkyard do the talking. Because we have one, the world has never seen one like it.
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