Wally Messner knew he didn’t have much to lose when he decided to buy his 1939 Lincoln-Zephyr sight-unseen, halfway across the country, off some sketchy internet website.
Even if the car needed quite a bit of work to be drivable and look good, he was sure there wasn’t much risk in buying it. And it’s hard to argue with his logic.
“Like [my wife Lynn] always tells me, if you keep looking, you’re going to find something. I’m always looking,” jokes Messner, a resident of Fond du Lac, Wis. “At the time I had the ’34 [Lincoln], and I’m a big Lincoln fan. That was probably 20 years ago now … It was just on some obscure website. Normally you think of eBay and standard places where you look for old cars, but this was some website I’d never heard of in Nevada. A guy had this car for sale that he bought out of an estate, partially restored.
“I probably shouldn’t even say this, but I only
