Porsche Legends – Part 1

You may have already gathered this about me, but if not, I’ll come right out and admit it: I’m a bit of a dreamer. I suppose that’s why I enjoy the process of coming up with ideas, trying to figure out how to do things differently or better, etc. I have an easy time buying into the dreams of people and getting excited about the endless possibilities. Course that also means I’m a sucker for info products and whatnot, but we’ll save that for another day.

I’m also a sucker for legends, buried treasure, and the like. Which happens to be for today…

For some reason (actually I just told you why), I can’t get this old Porsche ad out of my mind. It was a picture of a 356 backed into a barn. Barn door was open and the caption, at least as I remember it, was something like “Can you imagine?”, or maybe that’s just what my dreamer mind thought about. It was the greatest ad and I actually saved it for a long time before the great purge of 2006 necessitated my getting rid of it along with a lot of other great printed Porsche stuff. I found it kind of inspiring.

I searched web sites for almost an hour today, but couldn’t find the ad. What I did find though (when’s the last time you DIDN’T find at least one cool thing when looking online
for something online???) was another dreamy story about a vintage Porsche 356 racer found in an old lean-to barn in Mississippi.

I didn’t find much info about who owned it, why it was there, etc, but you can see from the picture that it certainly wasn’t a prized possession. It cracks me up it’s sitting next to an old thow-away stove. Estimates put it at a 1953. That would be a heck of a find!

The second story I can’t seem to shake was one printed in an issue of Excellence maybe 15 years ago about a Porsche 356 being hidden in some mountain side location in Cuba. As best as I can remember, the family who took ownership of the car never got to actually drive it, and ended up having to leave the country.

They hid the car away for safe keeping and hoped to return to retrieve the treasure some day. They left a close family friend with the location of the car and tasked him to keep an eye on it for them. It was speculated that it could be one of the lowest mileage vintage Porsches in existence today.

That’s another one I’ve spent several hours searching for online, but haven’t come up with any reference to it yet. One of these days I’m going to spend a Saturday going through my old copies of Excellence and find the story. Just to put my mind at rest.

Enough stumbling through my vague memories of great Porsche stories. This is Part 1 because I’m sure other great Porsche legends will come my way. Anyone have any Porsche legends of their own to share?

[Sources: Jalopnik.com]