German FAZ: Rudi Klein’s junkyard in Los Angeles007590

Porsche Tower: The old warhorses bask in the Californian sun on three floors. There are said to be around 200 of the Type 356, and we’re still counting.

How stories are created? A reader writes to the author that it might be exciting to go to Los Angeles, where a scrapyard is being auctioned off. The author happens to be in Los Angeles three days later, calls the auction house Sotheby’s and then finds himself in the junkyard. This is also pretty nice because the owner Rudi Klein, who died in 2001, hardly ever let anyone on his premises, and his two sons haven’t let anyone at all since then. Now the journalist, who is a hard-core automotive expert, is standing in 38-degree weather in front of a forbidding wall made of sheet steel in a slightly tense-looking area not far from the airport, where foreigners are, let’s say, perhaps unwelcome, and is amazed. Around it there are car parts dealers with a poor appearance and a wooden pallet store, desolate.

Starry sky: There used to be around 50 Mercedes 300 SLs, says the son. A few whole ones are still on site, some half ones too.

The son drives up in a golf cart wearing jeans and a T-shirt, old and dusty (the golf cart), with a broom and rake attached. The supposed caretaker looks after a few properties that his father has acquired, but otherwise does not want our conversation to be made public. What we like to stick to and let the junkyard do the talking. We have one like this and the world has never seen it.
Go to Source