While we were in Vancouver, Washington (across the river from Portland, Oregon) this past weekend visiting some of my wife’s family, I took an early morning walk along the Columbia River’s waterfront, which ran right in front of our hotel. We’d done a lot of sitting while visiting my wife’s elderly grandparents and wanted to stretch our legs while we could. My wife went for a run while I (who had not packed running shoes) went for a walk.
Not sixty seconds into my walk I saw something I couldn’t just walk past: an immaculate 1986 Mercedes 560SL. It was a convertible and the top was down. Washington had the weather for such vehicles, that particular morning being 59 degrees and less than 50% humidity, refreshing for a Tennessean suffering through a sweltering summer back home. I couldn’t find a ding or a scratch on the Mercedes’ paint anywhere. The interior was as pristine as the exterior, and looked like the day it rolled off the factory floor, complete with a car phone by the passenger seat. You were cool if you had a car phone back in the day.
But the whole car exuded cool, really.
As I take the last of my photos, I hear a voice behind me say, “If my car ends up in a movie, I want my cut.” I turn to see a man wearing a dark T-shirt under a puffy vest and short shorts holding a coffee in one hand. He had bed head, just like me that morning. He’s probably in his mid-sixties and I get the feeling he’s comfortable in his own skin. Turns out his name is Jim.
Jim said he had bought the car by accident, basically, while searching Facebook Marketplace for a dining room table in Palm Springs, Florida. When he showed up to purchase the table, he saw this 560SL and told the guy if he ever wanted to sell it, let Jim know. He called the next day.
So Jim bought a Mercedes while shopping for a table.
We talked about the car for a few minutes and he told me the details. The car had been fully restored at some point in its life, and while Jim insisted it wasn’t perfect, I couldn’t see what he was talking about. The white paint glistened. The car was old enough to have mechanical fuel injection and not electronic, but not so new that it had all the fragile, computer-controlled bits and bobs that tend to break on more recent cars. It was fitted with a 5.6L V-8, making only 230 HP back in the anemic car scene of the US in the ‘80s. Mercedes-Benz made the SL for eighteen years, 1971 to 1989, one of the longest production runs of any car. And the 560 was the flagship of the SL lineup, because: V-8.
I should have gotten a photo of Jim, but I didn’t. I’ll do better next time. But it’s always fun to connect with someone over their car. There’s always a story, even if it’s just that they bought it by accident while shopping for home furnishings.
When I asked about the rose on the windshield, he said, “I just found it on the ground and thought it would be funny to tuck it under the wiper. I have that kind of humor, I guess.”
