[1]With the recent death of first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong, America lost one of its most important pioneers. Without a doubt, our country is one that is built upon an attitude of progress, and no one encapsulated that attitude through his career more than Armstrong.
The very first living, breathing man to set foot upon the moon’s forlorn surface, Armstrong was much more than ahead of his time. His will to travel into the future, however, was also reflected in his taste in cars, and up until his passing the Vette that he drove was not too much more than a sidenote on the eBay auction block.
This has quickly changed, and the status of Armstrong’s former Vette, a ’67 coupe, is now a thing of epic proportions. Armstrong drove the car for a year through a special leasing program that was offered to astronauts by Melbourne, Florida Chevy dealer, Jim Rathmann [2]. After he returned the car, it was bought by a dealership employee but was stored and unused from 1981 till February of this year.
Its current owner, Joe Crosby of Merritt Island, Florida doesn’t have any plans to put the ’67 back up for auction, but has received at least three calls from participants in a prior auction and is willing to consider any serious offers. This is after the car failed to sell while it spent time in May on eBay’s auction block [3] at a high bid of $251,638.
Though the car is a fairly tattered specimen of late-’60s Corvette and barely runs; it is valuable not only in the historical context of its former owner, but in the sense that it is largely an all-original car, save for a replaced carburetor, water pump, muffler, wheels and what Fox News [4] describes as a “very bad set of custom fender flares.”
Otherwise, Armstrong’s former Vette is an original 390-horse, 427 car with a 4-speed and factory air conditioning. While not the most fire-breathing of the 427 Vettes, the iconic status of the car’s owner is sure to attract those motoring enthusiasts who are deeply in love with everything American!
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