$50 Studebaker Champion Turned into a Collectible

"Pushed against a corner was a Champion Starlight Coupe with a wraparound rear window. “This is the car that Bob Hope made the jokes about, that you couldn’t tell if it was going forward or backward,” he said. “It’s a bullet-nose Starlight Coupe, which is the combination you want. You could only get a car like this in ’50 or ’51."

Mr. Shiller said he found the car on a vacant lot in Amagansett, on the eastern reaches of Long Island, that used to be the Studebaker dealership DiSunno Motors.

“Of course they were no longer in existence,” he said. “And the guy who had it said, ‘Give me 50 bucks.’ So I pulled it out of there for 50 bucks. It wasn’t running but I got it running right away.

“It was a big mistake,” he continued. “When I first started working on it, I would get ticks. I had to actually fumigate the car.”"

Read the full article on the NY Times website.