...due to New Castle being a Chrysler town, there was always lots of MOPAR Muscle on the streets here, so I knew what a Challenger T/A was....one spring day in 1985, I had a sales appointment at a local truck stop and the owner was running behind schedule, so I stood and read the Auto Trader type stuff while waiting for him... I saw an ad for a T/A Challenger in Cincinnati and I had always liked them, so I bought the magazine and took it home....
...late that night I called and talked to the owner of the T/A....it was a 34K mile Go Mango 4spd, black interior, ....just about as perfect as they come and he wanted $5,300 for it.....he had some sort of an antique Buick he was wanting to restore and decided to sell the T/A to start the Buick project....seemed to me like he was selling the wrong car, but I didn't tell him that....
...the next day, I took a friend of mine on the trip and we had the cash with us to do the deal....I ended up negotiating the deal to $4,900 and drove the orange Challenger towards Indiana...a few blocks away we realized the T/A needed gas, the gas cap was the locking kind and we had no key for it...after several minutes trying to call the previous owner, I discovered all you had to do was push the lock button, so we fueled up and headed home....
...the car drove perfect all the way home...a few days later I picked up a MOPAR magazine of sorts and saw an article about matching numbers etc etc.....I took the car to a local dealer, the main mechanic was a friend of mine, he pulled a jack outside, popped the car up in the air, crawled under while I was reading the vin# to him and then yelled to me "yep, they match"....my first experience checking numbers....I immediately went home to check my Daytona (they matched too)..
...I drove the car a few days and a guy my dad knew flagged me down to look at the T/A and after checking it out said "ya wanna buy another one"....so the next day I bought my second T/A Challenger for $4,700, a 54K mile Slime Lime 4spd....now I was a MOPAR king, I had 2 T/A Challengers and a Daytona....I decided to sell the lime T/A but I already had the orange one entered at the MOPAR Nationals, so I took pictures of the lime one and hung them all around the orange one with FOR SALE signs that Saturday at the show....a guy from Minnesota talked me into selling the orange T/A that day for $6,500 and it was gone....several weeks later I sold the lime one too for $5,600...
while at the nationals that Saturday, a Plum Crazy T/A 4spd was parked behind me....it was my dream car at the time....I left my name and phone number in the car and believe it or not, 3 years later he called me.....that T/A is the one I still own today...another long story..
