So, there I was. A month into my trip to the US, 31 years ago, trawling the Bakersfield area newspapers and car trader magazines, going to swap meets, visiting car enthusiasts, looking over suburban fences, and following up any ’59 Cadillac coupe leads that I could get a sniff of — and with just a handful of days to go before returning to New Zealand, the hunt for T-Rex had reached a dead end. I’d thought we were finally there after we’d hunted down the mythical white ’59 Cadillac coupe owned by the ‘crazy old lady’ in the desert town of Taft northwest of Bakersfield, but then that came apart at the last minute. Mark II and I had just spent a roller-coaster day eventually finding the Taft-based Cadillac and befriending its eccentric old owner and thinking that we’d nailed the deal only to find that Virginia had already promised a first option to some guy up in Fresno if she ever decided to sell it. Our day of careful conversation with her had only served to make her realise what the car was worth, that time was marching on, and that — as much as she loved the car — she should sell it. So, after a day of getting us to the brink of thinking we had it, she sent us packing so that she could ring some dude in Fresno who’d been calling on her three or four times a year for over a decade trying to buy it from
