"You Made Not So Great A Deal"

Anyone who has watched Deal or No Deal on NBC knows what those words mean; you sold your briefcase for an amount of cash that looked good, but was no where near the amount in your briefcase. My brother Jack knows what those words mean too. No, he has never appeared on Deal or No Deal, but he did make one very bad deal once upon a time, long ago.

Jack was a Captain in the Army during the Viet Nam War. When his time of service was up, he renewed and was paid a large bonus for doing so. A few months later the Army let him go anyway as they had too many officers and they again paid him a large fee, this time as severance. Bottom line is he left the Army with a lot of money, for late 1960s early 1970s anyway.

He used his money to invest in real estate in which he did poorly and in exotic automobiles, in which he did even worse. Jack first bought a Maserati and spent months looking for someone to insure it. Back in those days automobile insurance was not mandatory like it is today. He finally found a company that would insure exotics and sent them his first payment. A day or so later he crushed the car, slamming it between a number of boulders outside of Colorado Springs, Colorado when, blinded by sunlight, he inadvertently drove the car though a "T" in the road.

When Jack got out of the hospital, his new insurance company paid off and he leaped into action and bought a Ferrari. To be precise he bought a 1961 Ferrari 250 GT SWB Scagglietti Berlinetta; a race car. In 1961 the car cost $42,000, but Jack only paid $4,400 for it in 1971. It cost him $1,100 to make the car "street legal."

Jack's car was one of five built for the 1961 24 Hours of Le Mans race, though his car did not finish the race. I once had a boss who was a Ferrari nut and I asked Jack for the particulars on his car, so I could pass them along. He wrote:

The car sported a blueprinted 220 bhp (at 8,000 rpms) V-12 with three 4-barrel Weber 38 DCN carburetors and a 9.2:1 compression ratio. It had 4 forward gears with a reverse. The actual maximum speeds (at 8,000 rpms) the car reached in 1973 (I drove and Keith [our brother] watched the tachometer and speedometer) were 61 mph (first gear), 118 mph (second gear), 159 mph (third gear) and 193 mph (fourth gear). It was a hell of a blast to drive.

Jack had bad luck with this car. His first problem was that the windshield was so pitted that it was hard to see out of and over time it just got worse. Eventually he could not see out of the front of the car and called his insurance company and they told him to get it fixed.

Well, if Ferrari only made five cars, how many windshields do you think they made? The answer was, "not enough" because there were none to be found. Finally Jack found a company in Canada that would make him a windshield for $4,000. His insurance company said they would pay for it, but they would also cancel his insurance and he would never get any other as they would have to declare that he totaled two exotic sports cars in a three-year period.

He said "OK" and as they removed his windshield (to make a mold for the new one) it shattered. The car was now undrivable and a new windshield could no longer be manufactured. But Jack caught a break when Ferrari found a windshield in a warehouse in Italy. They shipped it to Colorado and Jack was able to get the car fixed and retain his insurance.

This was about the only break he caught. The engine in the car was not original and had problems. Eventually the engine blew when our brother Keith was driving the car. Jack found a rebuilt engine for the car, but by this time he was out of extra money. If I remember correctly, the engine was somewhere between $3,000 and $4,000 and Jack did not have the cash.

He sold the car in 1975 for $5,500 and that owner bought the rebuilt engine which it ended up, was the car's original engine (the serial numbers were the same). That owner turned around and sold the car for $10,800 the same year.

In 1985 the car was sold at auction for $272,000.