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Great For The
State...
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Our European Friends & Acquaintances...
Our friend
Dirk Bensinger
was the retired Worldwide Sales Chief for
Daimler-Mercedes
in Stuttgart, Germany. His family’s legacy in automotive
engineering is extraordinary. His father,
Wolf-Dieter Bensinger,
was the engineer behind the engines and drivetrains that powered
the
Mercedes 300SL “Gullwing”—the
world’s first true supercar—as well as the
Mercedes Adenauer.
Dirk also mentioned Felix Wankel visiting their home toward
having his father Wolf granting approval for his Wankal
Rotary Engine.
Dirk’s brother
was the creator of the
"first of its kind" car from
Audi engineer Jörg Bensinger,
who created the
world’s first production four-wheel-drive
car: the
Audi Quattro
Dirk
himself possessed wide-ranging international business
connections, and he developed a particular fascination with West
Virginia—its landscape, its culture, and especially its people.
He often remark that in Germany people had one profession, while
I seemed to juggle many.
Great For The State...
During
2004,
my wife approached me with great excitement and asked whether we
could do something “great
for the State of West Virginia.”
It would involve extensive international travel, a large
assortment of vintage automobiles, and the garage store them. I
also created the website
www.myimperials.com
to be a natural bridge
between West Virginia and Various European Locales.
Yet the
dichotomy of criminal interests we had been facing since
1999
forced us to hide as much as I could to avoid upending all the WV positives we
had spent a great deal of time and money supporting. This led to
splitting off the positive West Virginia-focused material
into its own website of:
www.trigoot.com.
Nonetheless, I initially balked at her request where she reminded me that my earlier
venture—our legal-financial book business
AVLIMITED.COM—had
once drawn national attention. Whereas, in
1996,
venture capital interests had even ranked it second only to a then
bookseller called
Amazon,
and ahead of a then-juvenile legal publisher,
NOLO.com.
All of this unfolded in the
"Wild West"
era of the early internet, where many wanted a piece of what we
were building—while all I wanted was to retreat.
By
2005,
the “Great for West Virginia” vision was well underway— which I briefly touched upon in the piece titled
“How Could This Have Been Allowed to
Happen.” West
Virginia—its people, opportunities, and future—had become
central to our efforts, especially following a dire surrounding
developer West Virginia event in May 2005 while we were in
Tuscany.
In
2006,
during the Chrysler Nationals in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Dirk
and I were searching for a replacement
rear taillight
for a friend’s beautiful
1961 Chrysler New Yorker
that had been rear-ended in Germany. We found one for
$1,500.
Nearby, a dealer had just purchased another 1961 New Yorker—this
one badly damaged after falling nose-first off a car hauler. I
bought the entire car for
$2,000,
brought it home, removed its rear taillight, and sent the part
back to Germany with Dirk for his friend.
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Over
time, I located another taillight to replace the one I had given
away, along with front fenders and a sub-frame. I installed
everything and even matched the original 50-year-old black paint
so perfectly that no one could distinguish the repair from the
factory finish. |
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We flew to Germany in 2009 and were
picked up at the airport by the man with the now rear
taillight replaced red 1961 Chrysler Newyorker. |
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Dinner Time...
Dinner time is special in
Germany—everyone sits together and exchanges stories.
Unbeknownst to us at the time, stories about the “Two
Americans” had already spread. The Americans who bought an entire car just to get a taillight for
a German man they had never met. The same
Americans who had welcomed a German couple—total
strangers—when their 1959 Imperial broke down in Bridgeport,
WV.
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The same Americans who'd
drive the same vintage car throughout Eastern Hungary in 2008
during a major vintage event.
| Clarksburg Bridgeport 2011 |
During October 2010, I was
rear-ended at a stoplight in broad daylight after sitting
still for about 20 seconds — one that ended my second career
with the FBI before it ever truly began. By early January
2011, I had already given away my West Virginia Mapping
Program, though that did nothing to stop others from trying to
take it for themselves.
Months later, just as
prominent international interest in Clarksburg, WV began to
take shape, I was confronted with the request described at the
end of
Descendants, Goulash, The
Curious, Trains, Lakes And Automobiles.
But by then I was
exhausted. I had already spent eight years dealing with an
escalating series of private and governmental developmental
antics. So, I wanted to hand off the Clarksburg opportunity—an
opportunity that could have led to meaningful progress
throughout West Virginia—to others within the state. Yet I
couldn’t simply hand it over, for reasons already described.
Those reasons made clear why
we were the only
proven and reliable trust factor for such interest in
West Virginia.
Naturally, some people
will look through the images and accounts in
Descendants, Goulash, The
Curious, Trains, Lakes And Automobiles
trying to identify who stood behind the opportunity intended
for Clarksburg—an opportunity that should have belonged to the
people. However said interests observed the developmental
antics—what some called
“Criminal Constructs”—surrounding us, along with the
societal, physical, and financial devastation inflicted on us,
for which no one has ever been held accountable.
This, ultimately, is what
overshadowed and undermined all the positive work we had
accomplished.
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Next: Hungary... |
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