Jon reported that the car was "numbers matching" with 57,000 miles, no rust, decent paint and in need of a good detailing job. The car had just came out of the Reggie Jackson collection and had been shown in a number of magazines over the years. I spoke to the owner of the car and arranged to drive down to Kentucky and view the car. In mid June, my wife and I made the ten hour trip to Louisville. The car was sitting out in front of the owner's shop and it was absolutely gleaming! Before getting out of our truck I asked my wife what she thought and she replied, "It's beautiful, buy it!". What a great wife, eh? An hour later we were on our way back to Canada - the proud owners of the "Reggie Jackson Z" (as we had come to call the car). One week later, the car arrived at out home amongst a trailer load of brand new BMW Z3's. I was smiling ear to ear as the driver unloaded the car.
I immediately began researching the car's history and had a good head start since the original Protect-O-Plate was still with the car. Using an Internet telephone directory, I searched for the name on the P-O-P, Pete Brown, and sure enough found two P. Browns living in the same town listed on the plate. It only took two calls to reach Pete and he was ecstatic to hear that his old car was still around. Pete bought the car new at Bill Heard Chevrolet in Columbus, Georgia. It was his graduation present for earning a college degree. He told me that the car was very popular in his home town as the colors matched his high school colors exactly. He still remembers the roar of the factory headers and the "swoosh" of the air rushing into the cowl plenum breather when he let the car go! Here are two pics taken of the car, Pete and his father in 1968...
Pete sold the car after two years and it remained in Alabama until at least the early '80's. Sometime in the mid '80's, a Chevrolet dealer named Sam Pearce bought the car and freshened it for the local show circuit. I'm not sure how long he owned the car, but it was sold to Milton Kim of Hawaii in 1990. Kim was a prominent collector of 1967 Z-28 Camaros at the time. He sold the car to another prominent collector in 1994, Dick Bridges. Bridges displayed the car at Floyd Garrett's Muscle Car Museum in Tennessee. He sold the car in 1996 to Reggie Jackson (yes, the baseball player) and that's where the story began for me. Here is how the car looked after a good cleaning...
In the fall of 2000, I sold the car when I decided to go back to school to pursue my MBA degree. The car is now in California.