The Orange County Register reports
Gerald Willits was 76 and resided in Buena Park [California] when he died Aug. 14, 2014
[...]It's likely he worked in the plumbing business, according to some of the signage and advertising printed on the sides of some his trucks. He has a daughter, but she lives in another state. [...] Under California law, an original will is needed to transfer assets to the rightful heir and Willits only kept a copy [said Elizabeth Henderson, chief deputy public administrator for Orange County.]
[...]In November, Deputy Public Administrator Investigator Brett Williams found 69 vehicles parked in the front, side, and backyards of the plumber's half-acre Buena Park property [...] Ford Model Ts and Model As, Volkswagen Buses and Beetles, and dozens of other models
Those vehicles were moved to the Public Administrator's lot in Santa Ana, where staff have been attempting to identify them and determine their value ever since.
Some are labeled with tags: the "Chevy 3100", "Chevy 6400" and "Chevy Thriftmaster", and the "1960 Ford F100", "1949 Ford convertible", and the truck with wooden wheels and a crank starter that reads "1918 (?) Ford pickup".
[...]The vehicles are in a condition known to collectors as barn find. Stored outside for decades, none can be driven off the lot. Many were covered in leaves or had their upholstery and wiring systems destroyed by rats. Only a few have keys or title documents. Many, including a Volkswagen camper van of unknown vintage, were last registered in the 1980s, according to the most recent stickers on their license plates.
In addition to full vehicles, there are also parts--some valuable, some not. There are piles of tires, a truck bed loaded with rusted Ford flathead V8 engines and a frame for a 1900s Ford pickup, as well as hubcaps, headlights, radiators, tailgates, and gas cans.
Describing the collection as "a combination of 'Hoarders' and 'Antiques Roadshow'", Henderson said, "we have no idea what these are worth".
[...]Henderson recently set up an email account[1] specifically for interested buyers to get in touch. Already, Edgar Castillo, public administrator estate inventory clerk, said he has been getting five calls daily inquiring about the vehicles.
[1] SoCal motorheads, this was as close as my Google-fu got me.
Related Stories
The Orange County Register reports:
The Orange County District Attorney Public Administrator's Office will auction off a unique horde of vehicles Tuesday [September 1] that belonged to a Buena Park plumber who died apparently without leaving any legal heirs.
The 69 vehicles, ranging from 1930s Ford Model A Roadsters to a 1965 Volkswagen van and an experimental aircraft, belonged to Gerald Willits who died in August 2014 at 76 of coronary artery disease.
[...] The vehicles can be viewed Monday [August 31] from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Public Administrator's Office parking lot at 1300 South Grand Ave. in Santa Ana [California]. The auction will be held in the parking lot Tuesday [September 1] at 10 a.m. Gates will open at 8 a.m. [...] If you can't wait, and want a sneak preview [...], check out our slideshow.
Previously: Vintage Vehicle Stockpile Found at Deceased Man's SoCal Home to be Sold
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 24 2015, @07:12AM
This seems to be rather weak. Who, in the tech community, knows the difference between a flathead and an overhead cam? Or for that matter, between a F150 and an asshole with a small penis? Alright. Car collectors congregate. But it changes nothing. Tesla rules?
(Score: 2) by davester666 on Tuesday March 24 2015, @07:41AM
I do.
And typically, the small penis drives around in the F150.
And, no.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 24 2015, @08:02AM
When you said "overhead cam" did you perhaps mean "overhead valve"?
That would be the development that came after flatheads.
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 24 2015, @08:08AM
n/t
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by davester666 on Tuesday March 24 2015, @08:09AM
some engines actually have both.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 24 2015, @08:19AM
True.
There was, however, a considerable lag between the development of the 2 concepts.
...and the dig was intended for Fristy, of course.
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 24 2015, @08:45AM
Well, yeah, overhead valves came first, with the rockers and whatnot. But then we invented Hydraulic lifters! With auto adjustment for valve functions and then overhead cams were possible. Dual, in the case of V-configurations. But still, the internal combustion engine sucked, and it sucked so bad it needed to be blown, as in turbo.
Being digged by --gewg_, I don't know if I can handle this.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 24 2015, @02:47PM
A Vee engine is not a requirement for dual overhead cams. DOHC is one intake and one exhaust camshaft in each head. A Vee with one cam per head is still a single overhead camshaft design.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday March 24 2015, @08:23AM
I know flathead is a fish, but I have no idea what overhead scam/shaft may be.
(grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 24 2015, @09:04AM
Snakehead is a fish. Flatfish is a fish. Could be a flounder. Or a Halibut. But never confuse a flathead engine, one where the heads are flat because the values come out of the block, with an engine where the valves, and thus the intake and exhaust ports, are in the head itself. We could draw pictures. But it really is like explaining the i/o ports on a 0x86 Intel processor running at 4.77 Hz. Really. Oh, and a Snakehead is also a human smuggler, also called a "coyote" in some other cultures and across some other borders. Both are not to be messed with, I hear.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 24 2015, @09:41AM
Floundering - that's my way of life. Tho, I wonder what a holy butt has to do with cars; can you come with a car analogy to 'splain?
(Score: 2) by rts008 on Tuesday March 24 2015, @11:20AM
Well, I'll try...
You see, the Pope sits his holy butt in the Popemobile.
How's that for a holy butt car analogy?
(Score: 2) by fadrian on Tuesday March 24 2015, @01:50PM
Pretty good, as I think the Pope's butt is holey (well, at least it has one).
That is all.
(Score: 2) by Nobuddy on Tuesday March 24 2015, @06:33PM
Don't discount techies just because they are techies. I have 25 years as a sysadmin/security admin and I am a gearhead. My primary hobby is restoring old cars and motorcycles. I would know a lot about any car in that find, at very least enough to identify make, model, and approximate year just by looking at them. Same with most of the loose parts lying around. And from there google will tell me the current market value if i am not already familiar with that.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by nyder on Tuesday March 24 2015, @07:29AM
That is messed up the state will keep all his assets & property because the only will they came across is a copy. My guess is they aren't going to bother to look for the original.
But I'm guess when they go up for auction some auto collectors are going to be happy.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by RobotMonster on Tuesday March 24 2015, @07:39AM
Under California law, an original will is needed to transfer assets to the rightful heir
That's pretty stupid. If there is no will, the descendants should get an even split of the lot.
It sounds like the relevant Californian laws were written with nothing but the interests of "elder law" lawyers at heart. Saul, was it you?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by sjames on Tuesday March 24 2015, @07:42AM
It also crossed my mind that they don't seem interested in looking very hard for an original will. It also seems like a bit of a deliberate gotcha that they will not accept a clearly laid out intent in a copy of the will.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday March 24 2015, @09:41AM
One thing I picked up while living in California is that the state is rapacious. They're a bit more revenue hungry than average, and will not scruple if that gets in the way of more money. For instance, when I was not living there, CA was happy to let me keep my car licensed in the state, and collect license fees of course. No questions asked about just where exactly did I live. As it happened, I was in Virginia for a while, and they had enough of their own rules that I could not bring my car up to their high standards in the short time I was there, so the car stayed licensed for CA. VA is very picky about cracks in the windshield, basically can't have any at all. I figure the glass industry bribed VA to pass those "safety" laws, as they called them. After I replaced the windshield, they tripped me up on the side marker lights. I wasn't sure they were lights, thought they were just reflectors. Many cars don't even have them, so why do they have to work? But Virginia says that if your car has them, they must work. The choice was either to remove them from the car entirely and do a bit of body work to cover the holes, or fix them, which was not a simple matter of putting in new bulbs. The plastic housing had warped and cracked and the metal connectors had corroded. Before I had worked that problem out, my employer moved me. When I finally did change the license, and didn't renew with CA, they sent me a notice saying that I had to swear I was no longer living in CA, or no longer owned the car, or they would garnish my wages, or something similar. They were going to get that fee one way or another. Whether they had the power to follow through on that threat I doubt. They also wanted to keep collecting state income tax, and made threatening noises over that too. Just trying to scare money out of me, whatever works.
I've not seen any other state try that one. Was CA hoping the letter would get lost in the mail, or that I would not reply, and they could take silence as sufficient reason to have a court go after me? How'd they even get my new address, since I didn't tell them that? They're paying people to search out emigrants or something? And, since my new address was outside CA and they obviously had it, why'd I have to swear I didn't live in CA anymore? Weird. The usual way is that if you do nothing, the state assumes you didn't need to renew, and quietly drops your license.
(Score: 2) by fliptop on Tuesday March 24 2015, @03:26PM
Windshield cracks, in climates like VA that fluctuate between hot and cold, are considered dangerous because they will spread. I think the danger is in obscured vision and not so much that it will collapse. The state I live in (WV) is very strict about windshield cracks too.
I thought your commentary on CA was interesting because I know they're extremely strict on emissions, more than any state I've ever lived in. I lived in FL for a time and they had no inspections on vehicles but did have annual emissions checks, which I think has since been abandoned. Sometime in the late 70's cars started coming off the assembly line w/ exhaust "conditioners" which was basically a pump that ran off a belt and from what I could tell did nothing but dilute the exhaust w/ air. It was always the 1st thing I'd rip out because it takes hp to turn that pump. My neighbor, who was stationed in the Air Force in CA, told me they checked to make sure the device had not been removed.
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday March 26 2015, @07:43AM
The air pump boosts the oxygen level in the exhaust so the catalytic converter can complete the combustion process. I believe on newer fuel injected cars it isn't necessary.
(Score: 2) by fliptop on Thursday March 26 2015, @01:01PM
Well that makes sense. Of course, in the 70's and 80's the catalytic converter was another thing I usually removed.
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 24 2015, @08:07AM
At least the state was magnanimous enough to wait for the poor fellow to die before blatantly stealing property from his rightful heirs. God Bless America, land of kinder gentler totalitarianism.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Magic Oddball on Tuesday March 24 2015, @08:58AM
According to TFA, they're actually still trying to sort that out, and the auction is just to turn the physical assets into money, which will then be passed on to whoever they decide the rightful heir is:
“We don’t know who’s going to get this in the end. There will be some issues because we can’t find an original will,” Henderson said.
Under California law, an original will is needed to transfer assets to the rightful heir, and Willits only kept a copy, Henderson said. …. “Our job is to collect and preserve all those assets and pass it along to the person entitled to it under law,” Henderson said. “We don’t really know who the right heirs are here, but we want them to get the value.”
When I looked into the state laws out of curiosity, they stated that if there's a copy of the will but no original, the state assumes that the deceased person destroyed it on purpose, and in that case the inheritance reverts to the person's descendant(s).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by GungnirSniper on Tuesday March 24 2015, @11:57AM
Why is the state selling the property of someone else? If these vehicles have been in storage for decades, what's the reason for the auction? Is it to let the state collect interest on the sales while waiting to determine the heirs?
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday March 24 2015, @01:19PM
Depends who's property it "really" is.
For example, carrying costs can be high, and probate can be very long depending on state, so after an ancestor died in a house with very little equity about a year and a half later I got a check for about $2K. Came pretty close, just a couple months, from letting the executor (a local relative) mail the keys to the bank and/or the local property tax board. Basically all the equity went to the bank as interest and the energy company to minimally heat the place and the substantial property tax and various costs of sale. From memory I think the minimum time from posting executor announcement in a newspaper for creditors until creditor claims window closes is (freaking) six months.
You can also play games if the will is contested then its formal administration time and a judge decides and orders "sell everything and split the remaining dough 50:50 between the kids" or whatever so someone could describe that as "the state selling the property". You can see how this could piss off some heirs if they really believed they'd get grandpas classic El Torino or whatever and the formal administration judge says stop Fing around and sell it for cash to be split up.
Informal administration is pretty much the executor does what he wants to as long as its documented and fair and is willing to take the risk of the wrath of the judge if its bumped up to formal administration. I think there is some cut off (varies by state?) where over $10M or something its automatic formal administration.
In my state you can skip probate if the total estate is below something like $50K positive net worth. But it hasn't kept up with inflation so what used to be "only rich people do probate in the 60s" is now pretty much anyone who's not homeless or in a nursing home has to to probate. A $50K exemption was a good deal back when a new '65 car was like $2K and houses were like $20K but in 2015 its hard to avoid probate if you have a positive net worth. Typical example of .gov not keeping up with inflation...
You can also play a lot of estate planning games, if you've got legit legal joint ownership of "something" then its totally immune from probate, spend your cash on life insurance with named beneficiary, etc. So you can trivially end up negative net worth and the state can have all the rest, if you play some game like living trust the house and land to the descendent or joint ownership the bank accounts or whatever and you end up with pretty much nothing. Possibly the descendent was an idiot and didn't realize rusty pile of classic cars was actually worth anything when she signed it over to the state.
There are places that'll send in the sheriff in a month if you don't pay your prop tax or if you're old/disabled/connected they'll let you sit there forever with a lien on the property. Then after death the state, being the biggest creditor, sells it's property to pay prop taxes.
So far I've avoided being executor of my ancestors although its inevitable I'll get stuck actually doing it sooner or later rather than just hearing the stories or being tangentially involved. Its quite a PITA and I see why lawyers etc charge substantial money to act as executor.
The impression you'd get from a lifetime of TV is all wills and probate problems involve squabbling relatives but in my personal experience the biggest PITA is the process itself and the .gov. Barrels and barrels of grannie dies and her bank account is now empty, no longer getting SS of course, and the prop tax is due, now WTF? It turns out there are solutions mostly of the time consuming PITA variety.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 24 2015, @07:20PM
Magic Oddball has noted that I didn't cut & paste the -entire- OCRegister story.
That is true. I did blockquote a whole bunch of it.
(Missing the email address in the page was pretty bad, I'll admit.)
Now, if there is property somewhere and the gov't isn't getting to collect taxes on that, you can bet it is going to move on that.
If 1 of his kin had designs on those vehicles as collectibles or whatever, you would think that guy would have showed up already.
That not being the case, the gov't will liquidate the property, hold onto that cash (collecting interest on it, I'm quite sure), and release it to a legit heir if one can be located.
If you think about how gov't and the Capitalist system work, it's perfectly logical.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by Nobuddy on Tuesday March 24 2015, @06:36PM
I'd rather inherit that hoard, by a long shot!
(Score: 1, Troll) by Dunbal on Tuesday March 24 2015, @10:35AM
Yep, another example of the government fucking its people.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 24 2015, @07:54AM
When the summary was divided into pieces, the blockquote tag that belongs in front of "Some are labeled" and the closing tag after "inquiring about the vehicles." got left out.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Tuesday March 24 2015, @08:34AM
(Score: 3, Informative) by Magic Oddball on Tuesday March 24 2015, @09:03AM
janrinok, no Google-fu needed — the original article had this in a sidebar:
To learn more about the 69 cars that will be auctioned by the Orange County District Attorney's Office, send an email to: ClassicCarAuction@da.ocgov.com
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 24 2015, @03:56PM
That bought brand new 60s-70s musclecars and buried them on his property.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Nobuddy on Tuesday March 24 2015, @06:39PM
better, Carol Shelby bought 40+ brand new unassembled Cobras in 69 and packed them in grease and put them away in a warehouse.
Then at the peak of the Cobra craze of the 90's he started assembling them and selling them as new untitled 69 Cobras.
That is a man with long term vision.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by wisnoskij on Tuesday March 24 2015, @08:07PM
More like luck. The price of old cars seems pretty random to me. An amazing, rare, classic fully restored car can go anywhere from $6,000 to $6,000,000. Often based on arbitrary market factors. Just because it is old and cool and rare does not mean it is worth a lot.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 24 2015, @07:01PM
Brand new? Citation needed.
More than 1? Citation definitely needed.
Now, there is a guy in Texas who buried a bunch of old Cadillacs Stonehenge-|Easter Island-style.
Buried Cadillacs [google.com]
Cadillac Ranch [wikipedia.org]
There has also been more than 1 guy who has chosen a fetishized car to be his coffin.
Buried in his car [google.com]
-- gewg_