Lemays' Classic Used Cars -- Acres Fo Vintage Buys!!! (But Nothing Leaves The Lot)

Harold E. LeMay can't say for sure what is memory and what is detail retold, but entering his white-haired ninth decade the image comes to him whole.

He is leaving his mother at age 3, going to live on a farm with a childless couple so poor in 1922 that the next decade's Great Depression will not lower the family status.

A portly man bids him to slide beside him on the driver's seat and asks young Harold if he likes the car, a 1914 Chevrolet Baby Grand, so named because it cost $1,000 new.

What a question!

Of course he does. It's rare to see a car, but to ride in one!

"Well, then," says the man Harold would forever after call his uncle, "it's yours."

For nearly 80 years, Harold LeMay has continued to answer "Do you like the car?" with a resounding "Yes!"

Two thousand four hundred and sixty-two times he has followed those words with, "I'll buy it."

Wait a minute. Has a week passed? Make that 2,464: the largest car collection in the world.

That particular Baby Grand went by the wayside after his foster uncle's death, but LeMay has another in his Parkland basement.

It was carefully hauled home several decades ago in the back of a brand new garbage truck, which is how Harold and Nancy LeMay made their fortune.

The LeMays - who run garbage pickup in six South Puget Sound counties - have a 1930 Murphy-bodied Duesenberg Model J. A 1985 Corniche convertible. A 1907 Great Arrow. And three 1942 Chevrolets, one with chrome and two black-outs, clues to whether they were built before or after Dec. 7, 1941.

They have a Delorean. Peter Lawford's old Chrysler Dual-Ghia. Indian motorcycles. British double-decker buses.

Where is the world's largest car collection? Tucked away in 58 buildings or garages, mostly in PierceCounty.

One of those buildings is called Marymount, a former nunnery/military school in Spanaway where the LeMays house a third of their cars in such odd places as the boys' shower.

Last weekend they opened Marymount and their nearby family compound to 10,000 gawkers lucky enough to get tickets.

The open house has taken place on the last Saturday of August for 22 years. Notice spreads word of mouth. The LeMays struggle to keep it that way.

Lines of visitors gridlock the LeMay property for the chance to see the same model pickup truck their grandparents used on the farm, the car their parents dated in, the one in which they learned to drive.

Some 400 volunteers usher them past the LeMays' modest home to the couple's immodest collection of Americana: $2 bills, salt and pepper shakers, antique oil cans, car jacks, Nancy LeMay's 2,000 dolls and cars, cars, cars.

Here's the good news for history buffs:

All of this someday will be open to the public on a daily basis.

Tacoma is racing forward with plans to build the Harold E. LeMay Museum next to the Tacoma Dome within the next three years. The city doesn't want to take a chance that Harold LeMay will change his mind about donating the car equivalent of the National Air and Space Museum.

A curator with the Museum of Transportation in St. Louis recently spent a week studying the collection and told the LeMay Museum task force to stop saying it's the biggest in the world.

Why, asked the crestfallen task force? Isn't it? The Guinness Book of Records says it is.

It is, Molly J. Carsten said - but it's much more than that. Whether it was by keen instinct or dumb luck, LeMay has quietly saved the most significant examples of American car history.

Included are spectacular cars: a completely original 1928 Pierce-Arrow, a left-hand-drive 1925 Rolls-Royce Springfield. But the bulk are blue-collar cars, the workhorses of our culture.

Seeing them sparks memories: One woman staggered away from a 1955 black Chevrolet coupe identical to the one in which her husband proposed, saying, "I can smell the perfume I wore that night!"

Someone once figured the LeMays could dip into their car collection every day for six years and never drive the same car.

And still, the impish, spry LeMay fires up his flatbed hauler and goes out to snag more, two or three times a week.

Every day, more `junk'

Collecting has been called "the pleasantest of insanities."

In "Collecting: An Unruly Passion," psychiatrist Werner Muensterberger summarizes that collectors seek relief from what one calls "unbearable restlessness." Their forays to find another piece for their collections take on a purpose - challenge and accomplishment.

You could ask LeMay about that, if you could get him to sit still.

"People think he had some great inheritance, but he didn't," says Nancy LeMay, his third wife and the one who stuck, so far for 36 years. "He was just a hard worker.

"He'll be 80 in September, and he was up at 5:30 this morning exercising, and then off he goes. He does that seven days a week."

Almost every day, he brings home more of what his wife calls "junk."

He sees himself not as a collector but as a saver, a preserver. He strikes a good bargain at auctions, car sales or in someone's driveway. But he is interested in cars for cars' sake, not for their monetary value, says his grandson, Eric LeMay, who is directing the museum project.

Legend has it LeMay has sold only five cars in his lifetime - and bought three of them back.

Outsiders have guessed at the value, placing it as high as $300 million, but nothing makes LeMay run in the opposite direction faster than to bring it up.

Nancy LeMay, however, can talk dollars, as in "that paint must be a $1,000 a gallon!"

The LeMays grew up equally poor.

LeMay was born in Yakima in 1919, soon moving to Tacoma. His mother worked at a department store, traveling by ship to San Francisco for buying trips. Harold, at 3, went to live on a farm 12 miles from his present home.

Corralled briefly, LeMay recalls that he had nothing surplus growing up but didn't feel he was lacking.

"I don't remember ever being hungry," he says.

But he certainly remembers learning to make do.

In high school, he began collecting scrap and selling it. After he graduated he bought his first garbage route, rehabbing beater trucks to make the business work.

One garbage route led to another. Today, Harold LeMay Enterprises is listed as one of the top 20 hauling and disposal companies in the nation, with $46 million in revenue in 1998.

"I just continued to buy routes," he says. "It's kind of like the cars. I just had to have another one. Good thing it wasn't beer."

In 1991, he was honored nationally for his pioneering work in curbside collection and recycling. But there have been bumps. Even recently. The LeMay company is taking the heat for a controversial new landfill near Eatonville.

But that hasn't stopped LeMay from shopping. He just bought another little garbage company, his 25th.

`This cannot be the norm!'

LeMay found his soul mate in Nancy LeMay.

They lived in an apartment above the garbage business until 20 years ago; then they moved across the road.

Between them they have seven living children, 17 grandchildren and "five greats" who flow in and out of the house.

The LeMays figure they've lived alone just six months in their 36 years together. There are four or five people for dinner every night, which is Nancy LeMay's doing.

She grew up in Porter, seven miles from Elma in Thurston County. Her father was a logger and a shingle weaver - when he was employed.

She's always been surrounded by family. Fourteen of the 27 kids at Porter's one-room schoolhouse were her cousins.

During the Depression, kids collected gum wrappers, string, rubber bands. Nancy LeMay, who is 17 years younger than her husband, remembers making tinfoil balls.

Possessions had value. Paper investments did not.

Today, Nancy LeMay's 2,000 dolls share space with LeMay's cars.

Of course, the reason they collect so much is because they didn't have much, says Nancy LeMay.

"We had to get this craziness somewhere. This cannot be the norm!"

Automobiles were becoming more commonplace in the 1920s. Soldiers returning home from World War I built roads. Henry Ford used the assembly line to bring down car prices.

In the hardest of times a decade later, people would give up their houses but not their cars.

All of it influenced Harold LeMay, who loves all cars equally.

He was collecting 1950s cars in the 1970s and 1970s cars in the 1980s, long before anyone else wanted them.

"He seems to have an eye for what looks usual but is unusual," says his wife.

Nancy LeMay has driven new garbage trucks across the country. She is enlisted to go along to auctions so she can drive the latest classic car home.

She's frequently asked: Doesn't it bother you when he brings home another car?

"It doesn't particularly, as long he doesn't park it in the garden, which he has done."

Driving home a Metro bus

The sanctuary called Marymount is two miles from the LeMays' home. It houses about a third of the LeMay cars.

People park here to shuttle by bus to the LeMays' home for the annual open house. Often as not, they end up with LeMay behind the wheel.

Among his newest possessions is a yellow-and-cream articulated Metro bus, which Nancy LeMay says he bought for no greater purpose than the thrill of driving it from Seattle.

Marymount was built on 87 acres in 1922 by Dominican nuns returning from Europe, where they'd served in World War I.

The nuns ran the Marymount Military Academy. The boys lived on one side of the chapel, the nuns on the other.

LeMay remembers Marymount from the early 1940s, when it was on his route. The garbage cans from the boys' cafeteria were filled with sloppy food made heavier when the cans were left under a drain spout.

"It's a wonder I have any back at all," he says.

The school closed in the 1970s and the nuns gave way in 1992. They sold to LeMay on his promise that he wanted only to save the place.

Other than the addition of hundreds and hundreds of gorgeous cars and much maintenance, he's hardly altered it.

The 1907 Great Arrow has a star position on the school auditorium stage.

A 1949 Kaiser Indian Ceramic with a delectable pastel paint job is displayed at a showroom tilt in the boys' shower.

It's hard to take it all in!

On one side of the auditorium are the eight cars that LeMay so far has donated to the proposed museum, which is now an entity separate from himself.

They range from a 1915 Simplex Crane to the 1983 Delorean, each in perfect condition, each with some notable feature that influenced automobile evolution.

The transition of turning the cars over is difficult for his grandfather, Eric LeMay says. Until the nonprofit museum is fully funded, it's better that the cars stay safely in his grandfather's name.

The volume is staggering.

Cars are squeezed in side by side with just inches to spare.

There are 100 Chevrolets in the gym. The oldest lean down platforms from the bleachers like shoes on a rack. Beneath them are row after row of old Chevys, memory makers all.

There's a room just with Ford Model T's. A truck room. A mini room. An "orphan" room for cars that don't fit anywhere else: The Edsels, Hudsons, Kaisers, a Maxwell.

Each has a story.

As reluctant as he is to waste good work time by sitting down to talk, LeMay will go on all day telling stories - and listening to them, too - as he moves from car to car.

This Harley-Davidson motorcycle and sidecar are interesting enough on their own, but when LeMay tells that he bought the vehicle from a man who used the sidecar to show the world to his disabled daughter, the motorcycle warms with life.

This 1907 Great Arrow with travel stickers all over the windshield was restored in 1965 by Bert Lobberegt Jr. of Issaquah, who drove it 9,600 miles coast to coast.

The museum folks would like to capture all of these stories.

Tacoma: moving up

Tacoma is on a roll making itself a cultural tourism destination.

Officials hope to have 10 major projects complete by 2002, including a $30 million art museum and an international museum of glass.

"We have lagged behind, but now there's a lot of interest," says City Councilman Kevin Phelps, a LeMay Museum supporter since the beginning.

The LeMay Museum will get prime position next to the Tacoma Dome, which is visible from Interstate 5 and has easy access.

About 350 cars will be displayed and interpreted in the museum, and 1,000 will be nearby in a storage facility so true motorheads can get their fill.

"We're already getting inquiries from tour companies in Germany and Asia," Phelps said.

Howard Lovering, who was founding director of the Museum of Flight, is the master planner for the LeMay Museum.

Cars have such appeal, it's practically a shoo-in, he says.

"If we can do as good a job as the LeMays do, we'll just have to open the doors and stand back."

Some of the cars are fully restored. Many have original paint, upholstery and "fuzzy dice hanging from the mirror," Eric LeMay says.

"They aren't works of art. They're works of history."

The 1911 Cadillac had the first electric start engine, opening the world to women who didn't have a chauffeur to crank the engine. Rally for the vote!

Eric LeMay said kids believe that everyone was poor in the Great Depression. But here is a Duesenberg that cost $20,000 to $30,000 new, and here is a $495 Ford.

Then there are the black-out Chevys. Kids think of World War II as being so foreign. The cars are proof of how war touched us at home.

"It doesn't matter if you are 12 or nearing 80," says Eric LeMay, 28. "You remember when cars began to come in on your radar."

Cars, movies and music are the three cultural touchstones for Americans.

"Those are the things that connect us," Eric LeMay says. "The cars reflect the everyday thoughts and dreams of the middle class."

Who better to show that than a blue-collar family who found the American dream in a blue-collar town.

The museum? Her idea

It was Nancy LeMay who came up with the idea of a museum.

She was sitting in her rocking chair, looking around, when all of a sudden it struck her:

"Oh, my gosh! What if something were to happen to Harold and me tomorrow? What in the world would the kids and grandkids do with all this junk!"

She knew LeMay would not be concerned.

"In the first place, he's never going to die," she says. "And in the second, he's going to take it all with him."

A 1998 article in the Journal of Aging Studies tells about a long-term study of people who came through the hardships of 1930 to 1944 psychologically more healthy than when they went in.

People who look beyond hardships to how they can compensate for losses or resolve crises likely acquire higher levels of wisdom than whose who despair or dwell on the negative.

LeMay does not remember coming through his lean years determined to find success. He just never stopped working, and eventually it paid off.

But he knows it shaped him.

"I think all of this has to do with me trying to make some use of everything. I never throw anything away."

He has found gold in other people's garbage, but it shows only in his cars.

It may not be possible to hide the world's largest car collection, but he's come close.

He is known to auctioneers but otherwise slips by pretty much unnoticed in the car world, his shrewd business sense hidden by his coveralls.

"Ask him about the one car I bought," Nancy LeMay coaxes.

An auctioneer at Seattle Center was hammering on LeMay to get him to go above his high bid of $19,250 on a 1957 Oldsmobile Starfire 98 convertible in mint condition.

Finally, wearying, the auctioneer shouted to Nancy LeMay, who was sitting by herself, "Nancy, you'll pay $20,000 for this car, won't you?"

"And I hear this high-pitched voice behind me go `Yes!' and he said `Sold!' " LeMay recalls.

"That was $750 more than I was going to pay!"

At this, Nancy LeMay turns a sly eye toward her husband that sums up his success.

"But you wouldn't sell it for that, would you, Mr. LeMay."