History Huge vintage Texas car collection crushed!

Just saw this over on Ford Barn. I'm feeling physically ill!
Texas Car Collection Crushed! 1930s to 1970s vintage cars & trucks scrapped! Ford, Buick, Packard + - YouTube

 

WWHAAAWWHYY?

 

That is heartbreaking!! Did no one know of his collection or does anyone know what went wrong? They said the crack heads burned down the property with all the paperwork,was there no way to apply for duplicates? That has got to be worse news this year do far.

 

So very sad......

 

Couldn’t stand to watch it all.

 

As sad as it was to watch all of that video, I am grateful that the video was made and posted, because otherwise, we would have never have known about this.

What a tragic loss of vintage cars, metal, parts, tons of great parts that could have and should have been saved, but its obvious what a logistical nightmare that would have been, to try to save all of it !

Pretty sad commentary on a hidden treasure trove, that was passionately collected over a lifetime, only to be vandalized and scrapped !

Its a shame that these gentleman, were not contracted, to live on the property and protect that goldmine, that is now dust in the wind !

 

That's a crying shame....just plane sucks.

 

I believe the cars in this collection were all available. I follow a guy on Instagram that saved several including a 32 5 window.

 

While I agree it is a shame that they junked those cars, most people would not want to spend the years it would take to part out those cars. Even trying to sell the cars whole would be a challenge.
I have tried to sell whole 50's 4 door cars before. The kind that is too good to crush, not worth fixing. Most times the people that come to look at them have an excuse to not buy them. No room to put it, the parts they need are not good enough for them, they do not want to pay as much as the crusher will pay, they have no way to move it and do not want to pay the hauling fees. It is frustrating.
You have to remember that while we think the old car market is a big thing it is really quite small in business terms. Everyone has a couple cars in their house to get to work. Very few have an extra car to sit in the garage just to look at.

 

Man..... That really sucks. There's a few in the first few minutes of video I'd have taken.

 

That was hard to watch. I kind of fast-forwarded through as I couldn't stand to see the cars getting crushed. Really unfortunate, but I was glad to see that at least a few of them got saved.

 

Make it stop!

 

A good reason to not have to provide paperwork on old cars that have been off the road and only good for parts.
Most of those probably would not have been crushed in a non title state.

 

I can totally understand, many owner won’t sell, want want way too much for anything when you ask, or “ I’m going to fix it someday” and then die. Families don’t care and see little value in anything but the property and for the most part are right. There are still a lot of places like this in the USA.

 

What a waste. Excepting liability issues, they could have made a ton of money by just advertising it as a pic a part for a few months.

 

I attended an event once where the family, wife and kids sold off their late father's stock pile of cars and parts, pretty much the size of what this guy had. The deal was for 90 dollars one complete car with everything you could throw into it. My buddy obtain a 50 Merc, 2 door, along with a complete drive train from a Chevy Impala (1961 or 62). They had a lot of rusted out stuff but most everything was gone within a month, with most of the good stuff leaving the first weekend. This was around 1968. After that they sold off the scrap or paid someone to haul it off. This type of event comes once in a lifetime.

 

Sad deal. Times are a changing. And it's not just old cars we are losing.

 

Was that a "collection" or a junkyard? Looks kinda like a junkyard to me.

 

It looks like the owner went to great lengths to cover and protect those cars. Preserving his gold mine. A lot of them are very complete and the rest have perfectly good usable parts. This is clearly not what he intended and is rolling over in his grave right now. So very sad......

 

The grand irony of this is that the owner was trying to save them from the crusher, but may have sealed their fate by hoarding them away. If those cars were sold off to people that wanted to save them over the years, or parted out, this never would have happened.

Let this be a lesson to all you car hoarders!

 

Maybe we should crush all our cars now to save someone else the grief of having to watch more of this on youtube later?

 

That video should be edited into some 'dangers of hoarding' clips and shown at commercial breaks during televised vintage/classic auto auctions. Although the auction outfits probably wouldn't go for that as fewer cars drives up prices...

 

the insanity!...was gonna have some lunch, now I'm not very hungry...

 

I saw that video a few weeks back. Some were saved, (i think the lincoln premier, & 51 merc were saved) but, that was hard to watch. The old guy that collected them all those years built a "new" shed for each he dragged home. Kept them out of the elements, only to have the crackheads come by & vandalize/steal after he was gone. Then, they burned down the house, containing all the titles for those cars

 

A guy leaves a lot of non-op cars to his heirs, odds are they'll meet the crusher. It is not reasonable to expect family to put their lives on hold while they deal with your stuff. Let alone the cost of maintaining the property, paying taxes and etc. while the derelicts are slowly disponsed of. It was your hobby, not theirs. It takes years, decades even, to learn earn intracacies of the old car market.

 

Knew a local farmer who had a similar hoard. No one wanted to buy any of them as they were about the condition as the ones in the video. This was a few years back when scrap was extremely high. He had a crusher come in and they crushed 117 cars and trucks all which he had titles for. He told me that he got enough money to build himself a new home!

 

More often than not these days, I am seeing hoarding resulting in scrapping. Whether that is collections of parts or collections of whole cars or a combination of the two.

If you guys are doing this, you need to stop.

It's people who hoard that are responsible for making sure that things like this happen. If you make sure that your collection is off and to safe hands that will do something good with it before you pass, this won't happen.

When you leave your collection behind for grieving relatives, who may or may not share your passion, in the worst possible time of their lives, you are saddling them with a huge amount of work to do in order to properly liquidate your collection.

That's nothing short of selfish.

Nobody wants a full-time job selling off a giant collection. They want some sort of closure.

 

The reality of this situation is that the majority of those cars were rusty relics that should have been crushed long ago.
A vintage junkyard with a bunch of salvageable parts ?
Yes
But a collection of rare vintage cars no.
A pretty decent collection of scrap metal too.

 

Damn shame but what are the folks that are left with such a large collection to do? As much as we all love the old cars and want to save em. Just how would you deal with the situation? I mean with work other commitments and who knows the logistical nightmare. Getting a scrap firm in to take care of it in one swipe may have been the families only logical option. Hard to watch for sure! Joe