Magnanimous Gesture
“Everybody knew this fellow had bought it from the dealership after my dad traded it in, and boarded it up inside a barn. It was not unknown, but it was certainly unseen. He would never talk to anybody about it. I’ve talked to the guy about it.”
Michael Prince had many an opportunity. He worked with Carroll Johnson and saw him almost every day for three years, 2004 to 2007. On occasion, Prince would bring up the subject of his dad’s car. “Can I take a look at it?” Prince would ask. “Would you be willing to sell it?”
Johnson would not answer. He would just walk away. His car ties, apparently, ran very deep.
Prince came to the conclusion that Johnson was always a buyer and never a seller. Just looking at the car was not possible because in 1969 Johnson had boarded up his classic so it was out of sight.
When Carroll Johnson died last year, Prince discovered Johnson had “three or four tractors, all kinds of farm equipment, tools, there must have been 21 cars in total. He never sold anything at all.”
And now the estate was selling everything. Finally Prince would have his chance to buy his father’s old car. But Carroll Johnson would still have the last laugh. The estate required the winning bidder to commit to at least 12 cars in order to get the boarded-up ’59 fuel-injected Corvette that Prince prized so much, a car his father bought brand new when he got out of the Navy and was living in Southern California.
There was another prize waiting on Carroll Johnson’s South Carolina farm. Yes, the ’59 Corvette was the featured car, but Prince was surprised and delighted to see a triple black ’66 Chevelle SS396 coupe sitting under a low-slung shed with a roof and no sides. The latest license tags on this Chevy muscle car dated to 1972. Johnson let the SS396 sit for more than 40 years. The ’59 Corvette had been walled up since 1969.
Michael Prince got help from his uncle, Jerry Prince, and his brother, David Prince, to bid on the 12 cars. “I got the Corvette, the Chevelle, and a ’65 Ducati motorcycle,” he says. “My Uncle Jerry bid on two El Caminos and two old Willys Jeeps. And then my brother bought some of the other vehicles.”
Prince had to chainsaw trees and tear down an inner room inside an old barn to extricate the Corvette. The ’66 Chevelle was much easier to retrieve and did not have mice nests.
Then a funny thing happened after Prince got his three new vehicles home. He answered a phone call “out of the blue” from a man named Jack Phillips. Phillips had been a friend of Prince’s father (Harold) and Carroll Johnson, all raised in the little town of Campobello, South Carolina.
Phillips wanted to purchase the Chevelle. He knew the car well. Prince wanted to keep the SS396, which he calls a “full tilt, black-on-black SS, every part there—350 hp 396, shifter, original four-speed transmission, console, gauges, even the ‘knee-knocker’ tachometer” on the lower edge of the dash to the right of the steering wheel.
But, since Phillips had been a childhood friend of Carroll Johnson, and since Phillips, like Prince, wanted to buy the car for sentimental reasons, Prince consented. Phillips’ roots with the car went deep, to the time prior to 1972 when he rode in this iconic muscle car. It just seemed right that Phillips should have the car. After all, Prince knows so well what it is like to long for a car for pure nostalgia sake.
“[Phillips] was like me,” says Prince. “He wouldn’t have bought it had he not known the car. But it had sentimental value and he was thankful to get it.”
