Now better than new, Lambrecht car star of Pierce car show - Lincoln Journal Star
PIERCE -- The museum parking lot was filled with power and polish -- a first-generation Camaro, a Bandit-era Trans Am, a Chevelle, a Jaguar -- but only one car was corralled inside a rope barrier, as if its owners feared it would get away again. Gerald and Betty Hixson had waited 45 years to reunite with their Chevy Bel Air, and then nearly two more years for a body shop to turn back its clock to 1957. “Oh, I love it,” Gerald said. He was still in the service the first time he bought it, in late 1957. He and Betty signed a three-year, $3,000 loan for the blue two-tone parked at Lambrecht Chevrolet on Pierce's Main Street. With only a dozen miles, the Bel Air was somewhere between new and used: The theater owner had tried out the car but decided not to buy it. The couple drove it for a decade before trading it away. Gerald paid $12,000 the second time he bought it, in September 2013, when Ray Lambrecht auctioned off his 500-vehicle collection on national TV. Gerald and Betty have since paid more than $30,000 for its restoration and rebirth, and they’re still... Lambrecht and his cars became temporary celebrities two years ago -- the small-town Chevy dealer who never sold his trades, who had sat on 50 old-but-new models with nothing on their odometers, whose auction in a former soybean field drew 30,000... The Pierce Historical Society's car show drew dozens of cars, but the star was the four-door ’57. It sat apart, behind the rope fence to protect it from smudges and scratches, and its owners sat. Source: journalstar.com
