For Lee Harris, that moment cameas a teenager, riding in a Mercedes-Benz
280SE Cabriolet. “When I was seventeen
years old my older brother’s co-worker
bought a 1970 280SE convertible in silver
blue,” Harris recalls. “I went riding in it
and thought it was the most insane and
beautiful car I’d ever been in.”
That ride served to notify Harris that
he was a car guy. Of course, at that age he
couldn’t afford a big Benz of his own, so
life went on with the usual parade of cars
that someone owns. Still, the image of the
big soft-top Mercedes never left his mind.
It just took a special moment in Beverly
Hills to bring it back, full-strength.
“My daughter was getting married in
Los Angeles,” Harris relates, “We’d been
out there seven, eight, nine times, and
she said, ’Dad, you've been so great. What
do you want to do this time for some off
time?’ I told her I'd love to go into Beverly
Hills Sports Cars and look at their cars."
You might call it a pilgrimage. “I have
all sorts of old cars,” Harris says. “I've loved
cars since I was a kid, and my wife Tarie
doesn't care about any of them. It's just
transportation to her. So, we go into this
beautiful showroom. And then there's all
these fabulous cars: a ’57 T-Bird, Triumphs,
and Jaguars. And there's a silver-blue 1971
280SE Cabriolet. My daughter Lauren,
when she saw the car, said, ‘Dad, get this
car for mom.’ I asked my wife what she
thought about it, and this time she surprised
me. She said, ‘It's a beautiful car.’ I
told her I was going to look for one.”
He didn’t have to look far to find just
the right example.
The deal that almost wasn’t
“I looked on Hemmings, thinking I'd
never find one, but this car comes up,” he
says. “It was a 1969 280SE Cabrio, white
with a Cognac leather interior, and it was
a bank foreclosure. I called the banker
and he told me they thought it was worth
about $28,000 at the time.”
Harris gave the proposition some
thought, mentally totaling up the potential
restoration costs.
“I was willing to take the shot at
$28,000 because I just had a feeling,” he
states. “I told him I didn’t need photos, but
he wasn’t willing to make a deal without
sending me some photos first.”
That’s where the deal almost went
off the rails. “I waited three days and on
the fourth day he hasn’t sent any photos,
and suddenly I can't reach him. And I get
his secretary, who said he was meeting
someone about the car. So I'm thinking,
great, I just got stuck. My wife said it
wasn't meant to be and I should move on."
But something was tickling Harris’
mind, and he couldn’t let it go.
“The next week, it still bothered me,”
he says. “I called the guy up and asked
what happened to that car? He said,
‘Actually, the deal fell through. The guy
didn't go through with the deal on buying
it.’ He offered me the car if I was willing to
match the other guy’s price. And I thought,
you know what? I'm not going to play a
game, so I bought it.”
Fixing a few bugs
Buying a classic Mercedes-Benz car
sight-unseen is unusual, but the angel
whispering in Harris’ ear turned out to be
right. Or at least, mostly right.
“I had the car shipped up from Georgia.
When we unloaded it, I said to my wife,
‘Tarie, happy birthday, happy anniversary,
happy everything. Here's your car.’ I gave
her the keys. She gets in the car, puts it in
drive, and it goes backwards. She doesn't
even look at me twice. She puts the car in
park, gives me the keys and says, ‘When
you fix the car, I'll drive it.’ It turned out
that it just needed linkage adjustments.”
Apart from that, the car was everything
Harris had wanted.
The interior was all original,” he says.
“The woodwork was uncracked, not even