Yesterday evening I was reading a post on Mitzi’s Vintage+Goodness=Happiness blog titled Too much new on Etsy to fit it into one title!. In it she mentioned a group of 1970’s workplace safety posters she had recently acquired and listed.

Mitzi’s post started me thinking that I have quite a few food related advertising posters from the same time period sitting in that garage that I really should get on eBay. And that got me thinking about the day I threw away forty to fifty old posters that would, today, bring well over $20,000 on eBay.

Sometime in 1959, an issue of the now defunct Sports Car Graphic magazine came into my possession. That magazine spawned what was to become a life-long interest in Formula One auto racing and old sports cars.

Nine years later, the Army sent me to Germany for a three year tour at a small military base in the Bavarian region of southern Germany called Bad Aibling. I was in heaven. Most of the Grand Prix races at the time were within a 24 hour drive and I was in the middle of Porsche country - the finest sports car ever made in my opinion.

Within a short time two things happened. I purchased my first Porsche and I started collecting the advertising posters that Porsche produced for their dealerships. I picked the posters up whenever an opportunity presented itself.

The majority of them came from Porsche dealerships located in Rosenheim, a town about 8-10 miles from Bad Aibling, or in Munich about 30 miles away. Sometimes I was able to talk a friendly salesman into giving me one or two, but others were “liberated during midnight raids” on the Rosenheim dealership.

For a period of time, for some reason, the dealership in Rosenheim put some of their posters up on the outside of their showroom windows with two-sided tape. After a day, or an evening, of drinking Maxlrain beer at The Last Chance gasthaus, when it closed at midnight, Gayle (my wife at the time) and I would drive the Porsche to Rosenheim and “liberate” a few posters from the outside windows so they would be saved from certain ruin from either rain or snow.

Three years later, when it was time to return to the United States, I was driving my second Porsche and I had amassed a collection of between forty and fifty Porsche posters each of which measured 31″ x 41″ in size.

My favorite was “McQueen Drives Porsche” which can be seen to the right. I’d acquired three of these. One hung in a place of honor above the couch in the living room of our apartment in Bad Aibling and the other two were safely rolled up with rubber bands at each end securing them.

When it came time to begin packing for the trip back to the States I started musing about the best way to pack all the posters so they would get home safely. My wife thought I was crazy. “Why would you want to haul those old things back?”

Over the next few days, an on-again-off again “conversation” took place about the posters with the end result that I lost. A few of the posters were given away to friends who were fellow Porsche enthusiasts, but the majority ended up in a box that was set next to the garbage can to await pickup.

Early Porsche memorabilia has become highly collectible in the years since I returned to the United States from Germany. Today, “McQueen Drives Porsche” is considered the Holy Grail of Porsche posters. Only a small number were produced by the factory and it is quite rare. Full-size reproductions regularly bring between $150 and $200. When an original in good condition does make an appearance it easily brings $750 to $1000 or more.

Today the posters that my wife talked me into throwing would easily bring $20,000 or more on eBay or by private sale. Add in the various Grand Prix posters, programs, leaflets, etc. that I’d picked up during our three years in Germany and we are talking several thousand dollars more.

Nearly twenty years later my wife started complaining about all the room being taken up in the basement by the boxes of children’s lunch boxes and thermoses I’d been buying for $1 or $2 for a couple of years. I’d learned my lesson though. I turned a deaf ear and ignored her.

Photograph by Vyacheslav Stepanyuchenko.

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