March 29, 2024
BANGOR DAILY NEWS (BANGOR, MAINE

Sports car with strange past joins classic display in Ohio farm town> 1954 Corvette had been sealed inside former grocery store in Brunswick

BRUNSWICK — After being entombed for 27 years in a bricked-up building and placed for another decade in a Florida living room, a 1954 Corvette has found a new home in a farming town in northern Ohio.

Terry Michaelis, part-owner of ProTeam Corvette Sales in Napoleon, Ohio, bought the car for an undisclosed price from Cynthia Sampson, daughter of its original owner.

The white convertible, whose odometer reads 2,331 miles, will be displayed in the dealership’s collection of 200 Corvettes, Michaelis told the Times Record in Brunswick.

“More than likely, this car is the oldest, lowest-miled, unrestored Corvette in the world,” he said.

The original owner, Richard Sampson Sr., was a farmer who went on to found a chain of 33 supermarkets. He died in 1969 with his Corvette still sealed up inside one of the grocery stores he built.

No one knows why he did it. According to local lore, it stalled on him at the Bath Road intersection where he had it entombed. Others say he bought it for his son, who drove too fast.

“There’s about 1,000 rumors about how that car got in there,” Frank Goodwin, a Brunswick auto dealer, said Monday.

In 1982 Goodwin bought the building which housed the Corvette on condition that Sampson’s family remove the car when the current lease expired.

“They had a deadline to get that car out and they made it by one day,” Goodwin recalled.

Cynthia Sampson took the car to Florida, where she put it in her living room.

“With Corvette people … they’re a special breed. They’re collectors,” Michaelis said. “The whole thing’s a little odd, isn’t it?”

Sampson, who had never wanted to sell the Corvette, called Michaelis about a month ago and they worked out a deal, he said.

Michaelis has no plans to refinish the car, whose original paint has bubbled and yellowed. That’s part of the story, he said, noting that the car will be displayed with a placard describing Richard Sampson.

The car’s original price would have been $3,498 in 1953, said Dave Violette, owner of Corvettes North, a specialty Corvette dealership in Waterville. He estimates that a similar vehicle in top condition would fetch 10 times that price today.


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