The story of this car was pretty cool...at least to me. So I'll share what I know.
One day last June I get a call from a fellow VW nut in the Philadelphia area who has stumbled onto a Rometsch that was doe to come up for auction in a sale of the business assets of an old repair shop in the nasty part of town. He didnt have the money to go after it but was willing to help so I basically worked with him so that when the auction came up that he would have my backing to buy the car at whatever cost it went to. It didnt seem that there was going to be any problem with getting it cheap.
Then the day before the auction my partner out there went by the garage to check on the car and it was gone. He called me right away and I spent the next couple hours on the phone with he auction company as well as the garage to find out where the heck it went. All that I could get out of them was that it was sold before the auction...I questioned weather that was legal and such but what was done was done. I asked the owner of the auction company to forward my contact info to the buyer in hopes that I could aquire the car from him. I was pretty gutted.
Anyway, the day before the VW Classic, at the toy and literature show my phone rings and it is a friend of mine from here in California. He sounded a little strange over the phone so I asked him what was up. He said he was on a trip in Pennsylvania and was visiting a buddy. His buddy went off to get some beers and while he was out my friend saw a note with my name and number on it and he couldnt figure out how it got there. I figured it out pretty quick and asked him if his buddy happened to buy a Rometsch recently...he responded that he was staring at one in the guys garage right then and there. In any case when his buddy returned he urged him to call me to at least chat about it.
So I talked to the guy and he said that he had been after the car for many years. The owner of the garage would never sell it, but he kept up on him and when he caught wind of the place going out of business he hit the owner up pretty hard and talked him out of it a day before it was due to go up or auction. He did get it pretty cheap and I offerred to give him a healthy profit. He said he already had someone interested in it in the low $30's. That kinda shocked me, so I told him to go for it. I never heard from him again so I can only assume that he sold it, probably to the buyer who offerred him the big money for it.
So it was the one that got away. :cry:
The wild part of the story that I dont know is how it ended up in a garage in the nastiest part of the ghetto in Philly in the first place...it truly was in hell.
Hopefully it will pop up one day all restored and pretty.
I shared the story with some friends at the Classic...one of which who said that he had just discovered one himself up in Northern California!
They are still out there I guess...never give up hope!