When I first knew Lenny back in ‘78 he was driving a Toyota pickup, a couple years old and thrashed; looked like 30 years old but was probably two. The day he bought the truck he had a lumber rack put on it, loaded it up and drove it to Idaho painting billboards. It never got broken in, an oil change, washed, dealer prepped, maintenance, tuned up, zip! Just drove it into the ground expecting to pass the problems on to the next sucker. One day on the way home he blew up the clutch going up a hill, and decided it was time. After the clutch got replaced he put a for sale sign on it for $1200. And went shopping for a Jeep.
One of the regular cronies that hung around the shop was Brian, another billboard guy that had been friends with Lenny for years. Lenny had had the Toyota up for sale for a month or so, and nobody seemed interested in it so one payday Brian offered Lenny $300 cash and Lenny had the pink slip in his pocket the whole time so he ripped the Franklins out of Brian’s hand and threw the pink at him cackling like a maniac. “Ha ha ha, you SUCKER! You own it now. Bwaa ha ha ha!”
Brian took it home, cleaned it up really nice and sold it for $1200.00 in a week. Lenny was so mad at him he didn’t speak to Brian again for three years. Brian would come to the shop trying to be friends and offer to buy lunch and always got the silent treatment. One day he came to ask Lenny how much to bid on a particular wall job, so Lenny got all friendly and looked at the sketch (which had the customer’s phone # on it) and told Brian to bid $600 on the job, and he let Brian buy him lunch. Then he called the customer and got the job away from him for $300.
After he dumped the Toyota off onto Brian he had to drive around in “Old Blue”, the shop truck from Hell. It was a two ton ex-plumbers’ ‘58 Ford flat bed with one of those cheap pseudo U-joints on the steering column that was made out of a tire side wall with 4 bolts through it, one of Henry’s “Better Ideas”, except it was all torn and worn out to where there was only one bolt left holding it on. To make a turn (or even to try and just go straight) you had to turn the wheel enough times to make the rubber thing wrap around the end of the column in the opposite direction before it would grab. If it normally would take, let’s say, 7 turns lock to lock it now took about 20. Driving Old Blue kept a driver very busy spinning the wheel back and forth and it went down the road about as straight as one of those old Bumper Cars at The Pike. A bunch of Mexican gardeners bought it one day and when they left, tacking crazily from side to side down the alley we could hear them laughing into the distance and screaming “Ay ay AY!!”
Not long after that he dragged a Jeep pickup truck over to the shop to have us all give input about it because he wanted to buy it. The claim was that it had 11,000 original miles on it. It did have the world’s hugest camper on the back, but that was to stay with the seller. With that on it it was registered as a one ton motor home and didn’t need to be smogged. The seat was worn out on the driver’s side beyond the padding down into the bare springs, and the pedals were worn way through rubber and into metal. I told him it had to have at least 200 thou on it and they were hard ones at that, with a fat driver. My Suburban had 387, 000 on it at the time and the seat was shot but my pedals don’t look as bad now as those were then. He bought it. With one ton springs and no camper it rode like a stone.
As soon as he got the camper off of it he got a little cheap shell for it and tried to reregister it as a motor home but the DMV didn’t allow it. Then the shell blew off on the freeway because he never fastened it on the truck, and he cried real tears because the insurance company wouldn’t pay him for it. Everybody picks on the good guys.
I don’t remember what year model it was but Jeep kept them the same for three years in a row and it was the first of the series. Later when he wanted to sell it he claimed it was the latest one, just that the papers were screwed up.
One day there was some young guy walking around in the shop looking for somebody to relieve him of his money so we went to find Lenny. Well, the Jeep was gone and in the alley behind where Lenny had been parked there was a beautiful TransAm that had just been painted black that morning, still soft, fresh out of the spray booth -- You know that perfumey Ditzler aroma that a new paint job gives off for about a week? MMMMMMmmmmm gorgeous! Except that the door was bashed in about two feet deep. The kid had parked his nice toy in a spot that looked safe, across the alley behind Lenny’s Jeep, and went looking for the office and in the minute or so that took, Lenny did Destruction Derby on him and left. I can’t figure why he didn’t buy any sign work from us. (??)
Lucky Lenny got into a head on collision in it and never got a scratch on himself, but the Jeep got a whole new front clip, paint job and engine! Still, it turned out to be a phenomenal lemon, and was in the shop EVERY single week that Lenny owned it, which lasted a couple years. Average cost was around $200 a week. This was the ride the Mighty Hunters lunched in Las Vegas every October. It had 3 gas tanks on it with a mechanical switch to change tanks. For Lenny. The guy couldn’t count to One and get it right every time so we or Auto Club had to go bring him in every time it was “out of gas” and he couldn’t work the switch.
He finally put it up for sale in 1993 for $2500, which was $2300 over the value, and a friend of mine asked me about it. I told him but he bought it anyway. It ran for a week and it’s been parked in his driveway ever since.
Oh, yeah! The lot where he bought the “Heep”, as we called it, called to have Lenny paint the back board. They had all the cars out and had just had the whole used car lot repaved with fresh blacktop. (If you are a Laurel & Hardy fan like I am you should be seeing this one coming at you by now). The one thing they wanted to make sure Lenny kept pure was their nice new black parking lot. Lenny got up on the plank with a five gallon bucket of white and as soon as he got the lid off he dropped the whole five gallon bucket off onto the ground where it landed upside down. In his own way I suppose he got even with them for selling him the lemon. Serves ‘em right for calling him anyway. Ha!
We used to say in the shop “If they wanted a real sign they should have called a real sign shop.”
Posts: 1859 | From: / | Registered: Nov 1998
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