PIERCE — Take away the History Channel cameras and the four-mile traffic jam and the rumored celebrity sightings and everything else so foreign to this town, and there was one thing here that wasn’t strange at all.
Ray Lambrecht was selling cars in Pierce.
Hundreds of heavy, old American cars — the Biscaynes and Bel Airs and Impalas and Corvairs he sold during the 50 years he and Mildred ran Lambrecht Chevrolet.
The 95-year-old waited until this weekend — 17 years after closing his dealership — to auction his collection of 500 decades-old cars and pickups, many of them trade-ins, many rusted and weather-bitten, but about 50 still considered new.
And the promise of so many potential classics nearly overwhelmed this town of 1,700 people and no stoplights.
An hour before bidding started Saturday — the first day of the two-day auction — traffic stalled on Nebraska 13 south of Pierce. A four-mile line of cars was starting, stopping, creeping and crawling toward a farm that had become the unlikely center of the auto world. Drivers paid $20 to park in front yards, backyards, ditches and a soybean field, not yet harvested.
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An estimated 15,000 people eventually made their way to Ray Lambrecht’s 80 acres Saturday, up from the 13,000 who previewed the cars Friday, Pierce County Sheriff Rick Eberhardt said.
“And we only got 7,300 head of people in the whole county,” he said.
Even as auctioneer Yvette VanDerBrink began the bidding with spare parts and old Chevrolet promo items — a vintage police light and siren set for $1,700, Lambrecht yardsticks for $50 apiece — those still waiting for bid numbers measured in the hundreds and the line at a trio of portable toilets was 50 people deep.
When VanDerBrink got to the cars, she reminded the bidders of her rules.
Win today, pay today.
“Once we say sold, it is yours,” she told the thousands gathered before her. “All right, guys. Here we go.”
She started the bidding on the first car — a 1957 Corvette pedal car, used by the Lambrecht kids more than a half-century ago — at $4,000. It shot up to $6,000, then $9,000, then $13,000.
The winning bid: $16,000.
And one bidder told another: “Yeah, we’re in a recession, all right.”
Minutes later, the auctioneer made the day’s only six-digit sale: $140,000 for one of the darlings of the auction, a rare 1958 Chevrolet Cameo pickup with just more than a mile on the odometer.
The crowd applauded. The buyer told the auctioneer he was from New Hampshire.
The crowd applauded louder two sales later, when the man who paid $80,000 for a 1978 Corvette — just four miles on it — told the auctioneer it was staying in Nebraska.
VanDerBrink chose to sell the most valuable lots — the old-but-still-new cars — first. And her buyers bit:
A ’63 Impala for $97,500. A ’58 Apache for $80,000. A ’64 Impala for $75,000. A ’63 Corvair for $42,000. A ’77 Vega for $10,000.
The first 10 cars sold for a total of $676,500.
Denzil Arms had suspected bids might be higher than expected. He drove up from Miami, Okla., in part to celebrate his 50th, in part to look for a four-door 1955 Chevy donor car for his two-door, and in part to soak up the scene.
He looked around at the crowd and the cars. This is history, he said. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. A person will never get to see a car with no miles.”
And in case he didn’t get his four-door, he’d already bought a stack of souvenirs: Nine yardsticks for $450.
Kent and Adam Schwert hadn’t yet landed a Lambrecht car, but it was early, and they were watching three Bel Airs and an Impala.
The father and son from Topeka, Kan., wore Pierce Bluejays pullovers.
It was a cool, damp walk to the auction, Kent Schwerdt explained. He tried to buy jackets from a Pierce resident. But the local just said: Take these, and drop them off on your way back.
The Lambrecht cars had stayed in or near Pierce for decades. Most had been parked together in the grove at the edge of this very field. But after the auction, they will scatter: To Washington, Ohio, Connecticut, Oregon, Indiana.
But at least one will stay home.
In 1959, Gerald Hixson returned from Guam and paid about $3,000 for a 2-year-old green four-door. He drove it to Oklahoma for his final year in the service — heavy equipment training — then moved back to Pierce and took a job with the county.
“It was a very good car. A super car. I can’t remember having any problems with it.”
In the early 1970s, with his family growing, he traded it to Ray Lambrecht for a station wagon. And as he did with so many cars, Lambrecht parked it. And wouldn’t sell it. Hixson tried.
“I’d asked him to buy it back many times in the last 30 years.”
This summer, the 77-year-old learned on the Internet his old car would be sold in the field west of town.
He found it Saturday. Paint faded, tires flat, headliner collapsing. But his car.
He paid $12,000 for it.
“That was my limit,” he said. “I thought I was going to lose it.”
He was talking about his plans to restore it when a History Channel staffer pulled him away — time for his interview for the special the channel was airing from Pierce on Saturday night.
By mid-afternoon, when the best of the new cars had sold, the traffic jam reversed. Crowds gathered at the old Lambrecht dealership for photos. The American Legion Post was swamped.
Pierce had survived, the sheriff said.
“We were very blessed. We had good crowds, good weather,” Eberhardt said. “But we’ve still got to make it through tomorrow.”