Honoring My Father By Swapping A $100 SUV

Like a lot of surprises in life, this all started with some spare cash floating around in my pocket and a few too many drinks.

I was up well past midnight and in front of my computer.  Surfing had turned into browsing. Browsing had turned into shopping, and pretty soon I was looking with rose-colored glasses at a bunch of old government cars that had either been seized, smashed up, or mothballed.

There was one in particular that caught my eye.  

This 1994 Ford Explorer that seemed to have more dirt on it than paint. The description from the City of Roswell didn’t help matters.

A lot of room for the imagination about the Explorer’s true condition turned into one dangerous thought, “There is something nice about this one!"

I’m not much for SUVs, but the terms and restrictions for the sale made it look like an easy score. No current bids. Only a $100 opening, and a big barrier to entry: no public bidders. Dealers and junkyards only. You can blame this restriction on our country’s sordid emissions issues which make a lot of these older cars virtually unsellable to the public in certain metropolitan areas.

I was too drunk to say no and, besides, I needed a cheap fantasy that would spare me a major financial hangover. I made my bid, watched a dinosaur from the movie “Jurassic Park” rip apart one of those Explorers on YouTube, and went to bed.

I woke up the next morning to this: "Congratulations, Steven Lang! You are the high bidder.”

I had to read that three times to internalize the fact that I now owned a 20-year-old SUV with no keys. That was the bad news. The good news turned out to be far more plentiful: The Explorer had no rust thanks to the temperate Atlanta climate. The entire interior was clean enough for it to almost look like new, and it had only 93,463 original miles. 

What to do?

As a long-time auctioneer and car dealer, the answer to this question was always easy: Fix it, sell it and buy something else. I had done this thousands of times. But this time I wanted to do something different. I wanted to see how far that $100 could go.

After a lot of soul searching, I decided to make this a charitable pursuit in honor of my late father, Kurt Lang. He was a remarkable man who not only survived the Holocaust (although his parents did not), but also had the rare privilege of testifying against the Nazis in his rural town. My father was one of the fortunate few to see justice prevail.  Before beginning a new life in America, he also defended many of those who were wrongly accused in his community of being Nazi sympathizers.

He had done the right thing in life, and I wanted to honor his legacy. Armies give out medals. Politicians get buildings and airports named after them. I would sell a few cars.