This month’s Hidden Treasure comes to us courtesy of Gertrude Schmedley of Pascagoula, Mississippi. Schmedley found me via the internet and I quickly surmised from her initial email that she shares nothing in common with the usual Vintage Racecar crowd that I hear from. First, she’s never actually seen a copy of the magazine (sorry, Casey). Second, she has no interest in cars whatsoever. Third, she considers all forms of auto racing “the work of the devil” and refers to racers as “Satan’s bastards.”
Schmedley emailed me her phone number and asked that I call her to discuss something about an old ugly car. Intrigued by the tone of her email, how could I resist?
Unfortunately, this woman can talk, and the call turned out to be the longest, most painful conversation of my life (actually, I mostly listened). Schmedley is now in her sixties and is recently retired. Starting at age five, in what seemed like real time, she took me year by year through her bizarre life.
In the Fifties, her father, Marvin, was an officer in the United States Air Force. She spent much of her early childhood stationed at an AFB in Iceland. When she was six, her father traveled alone to a military conference somewhere in Italy and never returned. Schmedley was initially told that her father had been killed while serving our nation. Later her mother revealed that dear old dad had gone AWOL to run off with a wealthy woman from a prominent textile family in Rome.
Back in the States, Schmedley’s mother, now penniless, went to work as a cleaning lady for an affluent family in Mississippi. Gertrude never heard from her father again.
A few years later, Gertrude’s mother remarried a one-armed man who had served in the same squadron as her father. The man had lost his limb while in the service to a skiing accident. Apparently he had sustained a compound fracture that later became infected as a result of his German Shepherd licking the wound. Anyway, her new stepfather was intermittently in contact with people who knew Marvin and learned that he had become the wealthy son-in-law of textile magnet Luciano Tomblentini; Marvin was living the high life. He took up sports car racing and playing the piano, and was evidently very good at both. He was racing with some famous teams under an alias and doing very well. He also played with The Mamas and The Papas during one of their early European tours.
In 1961, Gertrude’s mother died in a freak accident—electrocuted while bathing when a radio fell into the tub. Overcome by grief, her stepfather drank himself to death. At just 16, Gertrude was now left to fend for herself. She found work at a local slaughterhouse and dropped out of school. According to Gertrude, “I liked the work, the benefits were good, and I could keep to myself without anyone bothering me.” In fact, she liked the work so much that she stayed on at the same company until she retired in 2011. Then she bought a small trailer and moved onto the grounds of the High Life Trailer Park. Gertrude says the peace and quiet have been good for her blood pressure.
But a knock on her trailer door in October of 2012 has things suddenly not so peaceful. According to Gertrude, “A process server showed up and handed me a huge stack of documents. It seems my dad had moved back to The States in 1975. His Italian wife had divorced him and he had been living in Bunkie, Louisiana, since the mid 1970s.”
Her dad had died in August, alone in a small house with several possessions, all of which he left to his only heir, his estranged daughter Gertrude whom he had not seen in nearly 60 years.
After much internal debate, Gertrude made the trip to Bunkie to see where her dad had been living. Gertrude told me, “My father’s place was at the end of a long mud road in the middle of nowhere. The house, if you can call it that, was a dilapidated two-bedroom shack; really nasty, but far better than he deserved. Inside, the place was crammed with racing trophies, photographs and a bunch of other car crap. It seemed like mostly European racing stuff from the 1950s. It would have taken way too much effort to sort through the stuff, so I hired a bulldozer and in less than two hours the dump was leveled and all the rubbish inside was taken away with it. Too bad I didn’t know where he’d been hiding sooner as I would have loved to have hired the dozer to do the deed earlier with my father inside.”
As the house was being dragged away, Gertrude noticed something at the edge of the property behind a gate and this something is why she contacted me. Gertrude said, “There was a nasty old car in the backyard of my father’s house, may he rot in hell. The thing must’ve been sitting outside for years and it was a rusty mildewed mess. I have no idea what it is but from the number painted on the side my guess is it’s some kind of racecar. A local grease monkey told me it wasn’t worth much and that made sense to me. I had the thing towed off the property and a gas station owner agreed to sell it. I don’t want any of the money; the gas station owner will get half and the rest will be donated to the local homeless shelter.”
Gertrude said, “Anyone interested in buying this blight on four wheels can reach the gas station owner at
APRIL FOOLS!
Ferrari Monza
Found in a trailer park in Arlington, Texas, in 1973 by Harold Pace who took the “NOW” photograph seen on page 19. At the time the car was for sale for $5,800. Pace shrewdly passed on this overpriced relic.
Do you know of a Hidden Treasure? If so, send your photos and stories to Mark at [email protected]
