My favorite classic car was and always will be Rolls-Royce!

My history of the wonderful automobile goes way way back.

I was a minor intelligence official in France in 1949, and had a very small salary. I needed a good car.

Well, new Volkswagens were $300! New $-Cylinder Renaults were $350!

But when I saw a 1932 Phantom II limousine in perfect condition, I could look no farther! It cost $999 and the used car lot owner, Ben Shashua, took my check. I went to an Embassy phone and asked my Mother back in Virginia to lend me $1000 and put it in my account. The check cleared seven months later!

But I was frenetically happy!

Gasoline was $2.38 a gallon on the French market, but I got mine free at the Embassy Motor Pool provided I used the car in my intelligence work, which I faithfully did.

The car had a BINDER body. The interior was in black leather. Everything about the car was perfect, even brand new tires.
Ben Shashua gave me its history. An aristocratic family, the owners, had moved to England to escape the war, and the car had eventually been sold by a relative to Ben himself, probably for $100 or so.

That I know, for I bought 16 more Rolls-Royces over the next five years for no more than $300 each, and brought them back to the America on the maiden voyage of the liner UNITED STATES in 1954. The cost was borne(alas!) by Uncle Sam for they were my personal property. The entire lot, including a Gulliver Goshawk Rolls (1928) which was built like an old fashioned cab, and having four cylinders, and was a one off! It cost me $300!

Once back in New York, I took the cars to my home in Blauvelt, Rockland County, and enjoyed them for a while until needing money.
Remember, we are still in the fifties and the ROLLS fury has not yet started.

At any rate, I traded a famous actor the best ROLLS car for a BMW 1935 racer, and sold the rest to a wonderful friend, now deceased, who ran a Rolls antique service in Nyack, N.Y.

I was sick at having no Rolls so bought one in Sydney, Australia for $400 and brought it back to San Francisco and had it transported to Chicago, where I had a publishing company.

This car was a 1919 Silver Ghost with a rattan interior, and 7,500 Australian miles on it.
It was a 'shooting brake' or station wagon. How I got it was drinking a beer in a pub in Sydney and talking about old Rolls and a bystander took me to an alley where this car had been stored since 1932!

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