Dan's Papers - June 15, 2007 - The Italian Taxi

I don't know if any of you were involved in the huge traffic jam that ensued after a van hauling an antique automobile broke down on County Road 39 about a mile east of the Sunrise Highway last Saturday morning, but the thunder, lightning and huge downpour together with four police cars, two wreckers and a vehicle from the fire department tied things up for nearly four miles for those heading westbound.

The van was being driven by Iggie Franciamore, who retired two years ago from a thirty-year career running a BMW dealership up in the Bronx and who was traveling with his wife trying to bring an old, beat-up 1927 Fiat 509S he owned from his home in Scarsdale to the antique car show at the Hayground School in Bridgehampton.

The fanbelt of his van had broken while driving through the floods, causing it to overheat and eventually blow the radiator before coming to a halt across from Southampton Tile. It was some mess.

But in the end, the Franciamores would not be deterred. They spent Saturday night in a motel waiting for the van to be fixed, then showed up $800 poorer and about an hour late for the Concours d'Elegance car competition Sunday, where their beat-up old Fiat, a former taxicab, won one of the top awards. Theirs is quite a story. Not the one about how they got here. But the one about how they got the car in the first place.

I know that they won this award because I presented it to them. As a judge at this event, I had been charged with walking around and talking to all the eighty or so car owners and then deciding which of them had told me the best story about their car. The Franciamores won the award for "Best Story Told" hands down. What follows is that story.

Iggie Franciamore was born and raised in Sicily, the son of a taxicab driver. He moved here in 1960 as a young man and worked as a salesman for a few years at Hoffman Motors on Park Avenue and 76th Street. Hoffman Motors was the largest foreign car dealership in Manhattan at that time.

After a while, Iggy started his own dealership up in the Bronx and it soon became successful. Also, he began buying and selling used foreign cars, sometimes owning three or four at a time himself. But as time went by, into the 1970s and 1980s, what he could not get out of his mind was the little Fiat that had been his father's taxi cab when he was a little boy. After World War II, his father had sold this car to a man who used it to haul bags of fish between the docks and the stores in their town of Agrigento. When Iggy moved to America, and after he got his father and mother to America, all he could find out about this car was its model number, which his father remembered. It was a 1927 Fiat Convertible, model 509S.

At his dealership, Iggy told his salesmen that they should keep their eyes open for such a car. He would like to buy one and give it to his dad. But the years went by and there was no sign of one. It was a rare car indeed.

In 1989, Iggy was not only a collector of old cars -- he had twenty of them by that time -- but also a racecar driver for BMW. That year, he was preparing to go to Watkins Glen when a salesman at another agency said he had gotten a line on a Fiat 509S. It was in a shed behind a pizzeria in Scranton, Pennsylvania. The owner was asking a lot. It was, after all, sixty years old. Iggy was given the name and phone number of the owner. He decided to take a detour to Scranton on his way to Watkins Glen.

What he found in Scranton was that this particular Fiat had a split block. The story was that around 1965, an American went to Italy looking for old cars and returned by boat with this Fiat. He signed for the car at the docks in Brooklyn and began to drive it to his home in New Jersey, but never made it. It was a cold winter's day and halfway there the engine block cracked, the water poured out and it came to a halt. There was nothing anybody could do. In the part of Italy where this car had come from, nobody used anti-freeze because the weather never got that cold. That detail had slipped the mind of the buyer.

This owner tried and tried to find a replacement engine for the car, but there wasn't one. And from there, somehow, it wound up in a shed behind a pizzeria in Scranton.

As the seller of the car was telling Iggy about this, Iggy happened to notice the license plate numbers. They were the original Italian plates. 376 AG.

This could not be, is what Iggy thought. Ag stood for Agrigento. But maybe it was from somewhere else in Italy where they had the first letters AG.

"Where had this car been in Italy?" he asked.

"Somewhere in Sicily," the seller said. "A small town. I have the paperwork."

Iggy asked to see the paperwork. And after the man brought it to him, Iggy wanted nothing more, right then and there, to go through it page by page. "Could I use your bathroom?"

"Certainly," the man said, directing him to it.

And so it was here, in a bathroom in Scranton, Pa. that Iggy, after flipping pages, came upon the signature of his father as one of the early owners of this 1927 Fiat 509S.

"Are you all right in there?"

"No problem," Iggy said. "I'll be right out."

Iggy tried to negotiate the high price being asked for the car. But the man would not budge. And so Iggy shrugged and he left.

But in the weeks that followed, Iggy continued to think about this car. He saw his father, who was now quite elderly, from time to time. He would have to buy it.

"And so I called the guy back and we negotiated the price. And here it is," he said.

"And you got a new engine?"

"There are no new engines. This is the original engine, with rivets," Iggy told me.

I heard lots of other interesting stories about automobiles as I walked around among the cars at the Concours d'Elegance on Sunday. One man told me about his beautiful 1924 Rolls Royce Phantom, which he had bought from inside a barn in Connecticut where it had lain for thirty years. Rats ran out of it when he got into it for the first time. There was no gas tank. To test drive it, the man offering to sell it had to run alongside, pouring sip after sip of gasoline from a pitcher into the vacuum tank as the buyer drove it fifty yards or so up and down a lane.

There was a woman who owned a beautiful, bright yellow convertible called a Kaiser Darren. It had only been made during one year -- which was 1954. The front doors did not open out. They opened by being slid into the fenders. The woman had driven the car here from Islip. Before she left, friends had suggested she have somebody come along behind her in another car, a good car. She told them she had a good car and this was it. She would go alone. And did.

"Tell me a story," I asked her.

"Well, I have three other old cars. I really like collecting them. I could tell you something about all of the cars."

"I've had sex in all my cars."

Nothing, however, could come close to the story told to me by Iggie Franciamore and his wife, Rosalie. And so, that is to whom I awarded the prize.