01/22/99

Wait! Someday It Might Be Valuable!

One summer in the late '60s I accepted a job with a U.S. government research group in Germany. Working with a German graduate student at the University of Munich, we were paid to find and encode the contents of books about Chinese society and government, books which had been hidden in monasteries during the second World War to save them from destruction in the devastating bombing raids.

Armed with an extensive booklist from the Library of Congress and a tri-fold posterboard of numbered phrases describing the main topics to look for and list on each book's bibliography card, we visited libraries across the city. We checked out 30 to 40 books at a time, put them in suitcases, loaded them into the trunk of my assistant's car and headed for the riverbank or a swimming pool to bask in the sun while we worked.

We hired several German university students to help us, as this was a massive project. Wages paid stateside were considerably higher than the students could earn from local part-time jobs, so we acquired a hardworking team, eager to work long hours.

A month into the project, we learned that hundreds of the target volumes were likely to be in Heidelberg and Berlin libraries, so I was dispatched to these cities, where I hired assistants and continued the search. After a month in Heidelberg, again working with someone who had a car (essential because there are numerous specialized branch libraries sprinkled throughout German cities), I moved on to Berlin.

Dagmar, the woman I hired to assist me there, had no car but had a friend who wanted to sell his Isetta for 100 marks (25 US dollars, back then.) I'd never heard of the ISETTA, so we went over to take a look at it. There it sat: a tan snowball with bug-eyed headlights and canvas sunroof that rolled back like a sardine can lid, with two wheels set wide apart in front and two more set close together in back. Its one door opened across the front like the door of a refrigerator (I later read that a prototype had originally been built in the 50's by an Italian refrigerator maker.)

Dagmar and I crawled into the single seat, pulled the hatch shut and started the engine. With a top speed of 50 mph (on dry roads with a tailwind), our motorized shopping cart was perfect for tooling around the city. We could fit several stacks of books behind the seats and park it anywhere -- even on the sidewalks if street spaces were taken. We were fortunate that Berlin's August weather was mostly dry that summer, because this particular Isetta hated rain and insisted that I towel off her spark plugs on wet mornings or she wouldn't budge.

Halfway through September, finances to complete the library project dried up, so I reluctantly surrendered the Isetta keys to Dagmar and left for home. How I wish I had had the foresight to ship that buggy home! BMW stopped manufacturing the Isetta in 1962, but this "furby-like" auto still has quite a following, as you will see when you visit one or more of the websites dedicated to Isetta history and OWNER STORIES. The cheapest price I've seen listed on any of these sites is $1,000 (for a beat-up model that needs a major overhaul.) I'll bet that little car has made Dagmar a wealthy woman!

Have you been smarter than I was about potential collectibles? Tell me about it!

LINKS:

ISETTA

OWNER STORIES

Please send questions or comments to bbruno@snet.net.