Ray and Mildred Lambrecht opened up their Chevrolet franchise in 1946 in Pierce, Neb., a small town just a couple hours north of Omaha, and for 50 years ran it as a mom-and-pop operation. They had only one employee, a mechanic, and their daughter Jeannie helped out as well.
In 1996 Ray was forced to give up his franchise, though he kept all the facilities and all the cars that he had bought for himself. In essence, the dealership exists now in the same state it was in when the door was locked for the last time, in 1996, though many of the cars had been there much longer. Jeannie recounted that the decision to sell all the cars was a difficult one for her parents, who are now in their 90s, but perhaps an inevitable one given the collection's size.
When the dealership was new, it must have looked like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting. Perhaps it's that image that fired up imaginations when it was revealed several months ago that not only did Ray Lambrecht accumulate a collection of some 500 odd cars over the years, a number of them with delivery mileage, but that it was all going up for sale.
After an eventful two days that saw an estimated 15,000 spectators descend upon the town of Pierce, Nebraska, like an automotive "Field of Dreams," the Lambrecht Chevrolet auction has come to an end. And it really was a field of dreams for car collectors from as far away as Sweden and Australia, with close to 500 cars filling a specially cleared field just a few hundred yards from where they had sat for years.
Large car collections go under the hammer with some frequency, but we've really had to pick our collective memory to remember the last time a collection of garage find-condition cars of this scale went on sale. Lambrecht Chevrolet is certainly in that unique category of collections where the entire world of car collectors will drop whatever they're doing that weekend and tune in to watch the sale. When these cars head to their new homes, they will forever have the provenance of being a "Lambrecht Chevrolet car—" a name that, for car collectors all over the U.S., will require no explanation for years thereafter.
We set intrepid reporter Jay Ramey there to cover the entire proceedings. His mind was sufficiently blown.
The Cars
We say "car" because, though they're almost all Chevrolets, a couple other marques like Kaiser and Pontiac have also crept into the collection, likely cars that the dealership worked on before their owner abandoned them. A few really "heavy" model years are especially well represented here, like 1957, 1964 and 1965. The most recent car we spotted so far is from 1986 (a Cavalier sedan, if you're wondering), but this is largely a 1950s and 1960s car cache.
The Trucks
If General Motors was wondering back in 1964 why its truck sales seemed really strong in the Midwest, that might have been because Lambrecht Chevrolet was keeping a lot of that model year's Chevy trucks on the lot—more than they could sell, apparently. Sure, a number of Ford and Dodge pickups also found ways into the Lambrecht menagerie, but the bulk are relatively base-spec Chevy trucks from the 1960s and 1970s—the kind we saw in "No Country for Old Men" being driven by disco shirt-wearing hombres.
The Freaky Stuff
Lots of low-mileage stuff: during the preview day, perhaps the most popular of the MSO cars was the 1978 Chevrolet Corvette Indy pace car. With just 4 miles on the clock, and the seats still in (faded) plastic wrap, this car was surrounded by people well past dark, and well past when the field was supposed to close on auction day. Word around the auction site was that Jay Leno had his eye on this car, and most of the prospective bidders didn't really spend much time examining the Corvette in detail, knowing that it would be out of their budget range.
Think that's low? There was a Chevy Apache Cameo with just 1.3 miles on it, which sold for $140,000. Something sportier included a Corvair Monza with 17 miles, a 1963 Impala with 11 miles, and another 1958 Apache with just 5 miles. The mind boggles. Someone from Nebraska ultimately bought the Corvette and immediately increased the mileage expontentially just by driving it home. Nebraska is a big state. Ask us how we know.
Visit Autoweek.com for complete, meticulous, no-odometer-left-unturned coverage. Mark our words: Pierce, Nebraska, will someday be like Pebble Beach, but entirely for cars your grandma drove to church. Field of Dreams, indeed.
All hail Lambrecht Chevrolet!