Eichel and the Missing Car Story

  Eichel and the Missing Car Story

 1963

 Written 09/10/2016

   Howard Yasgar

In early 1963, I was a partner in a used car lot on West Main Street in Stamford Connecticut.

One of my partners, was a fellow named Abe Zion, Abe was the smartest and best entrepreneur I had ever met.

The third partner in the car lot was an elderly gentleman named Eichel  Blumenstock, he was a fellow that was a long time friend of Abe’s.

Every month Abe and I would drive to White Plains New York, and we would look for any of the larger new car agencies, we looked for one  that had A lot of older cars sitting in their back row.

Abe would walk in and with an air of authority, ask for the used car manager, then he would then talk the manager into selling us their back row of  older care that had been traded in.

Abe would pay the agency manager $50.00 for each car, no matter what condition the car was in.

My job was to get the cars running, drive them all back to our used car lot  in Stamford Connecticut and get them into a presentable and drivable condition.

Once a car was ready we would then put an arbitrary price  on the front window with white window polish. We would sell the cars from $99.00 to as much as $299.00 each.

Back in 1963 there was no shortage of customers, eager to buy a cheap car for cash.

While Abe and I would be attending to his other businesses, we would leave Eichel Blumenstock in our small used car office, his job was selling the cars.

Eichel, despite his age, and despite the fact that he wore his pants up to his chest, was fully capable of talking to the customers, filling out the papers and taking their money.

Eichel, was a pretty smart fellow, in his younger days before Hitler, he was the Michelin tire distributors for all of Germany.

When the Nazi’s arrested him, Eichel fled to Palestine where he met Abe.

Now in 1963, Abe and Eichel were both in America and inseparable, and I was a junior partner with them the Stamford used car lot.

Eichel, I found, was a very honest as well as a highly religious person.   

However, after several months, of our doing business, I sat down to do the books.

I soon determined that 10 or 12 cars were missing, from our inventory, so I immediately told Abe that we were missing a lot of  cars.

Abe went over to Eichel who was sitting pensively in a chair with his hands folded in his lap, and he sternly said, “Eichel, where are the cars, I am told that 12 cars are missing”.

“Yes, Eichel said, they are all on the highway.”

Now, turns out that Eichel Blumenstock was a devout Jew, and he lived in an apartment in the Bronx in New York.

So every Friday evening, Eichel would pick one of our cars from our used car lot to drive home to New York,

He would put one of our temporary used car license plates on the vehicle, and he  would drive it to his home in the Bronx.

However as he was an extremely devoted Jew, Eichel, could not do anything mechanical on Friday evening after sundown, and that included driving.

So if Eichel got stuck in the bumper to bumper traffic in New York, and if it was after sundown, he would simply take  the temporary license plate off the car, put it in his jacket pocket and walk home to his apartment in the Bronx, he did it, even If it took him all night.

Eichel simply abandoned the cars, leaving them stuck in the New York traffic.