Here are the first pictures I ever saw of the car. The car was sitting beside the owners house in Long Grove outside of Chicago, where it had been stored for a lot of years. It does not look too bad, or what? Well the truth was something completely different, which I found out when I looked at the car for the first time in July 1999. . The car was a rusty wreck with a lot of mice living in the seats, spiders all around, and the smell of it.....Unbelievable.

It was no easy job to load a 2800 pund 59 Mercury into a container 4 feet above the ground. To ship the car from Chicago to Norway without ruining my bank account was not easy either. I decided to bring the car to Wisconsin, where another 59 Park Lane was waiting to be shipped to Norway. This way we could use the same container for the shipping.

Three weeks later the container arived Norway, and I could get the car home.

Bacause of the smell inside the car I decided to leave it outside for the winter. Before I could do anything at all I had to desinfect the interior. I don't have numbers on all the dead mice I found in the car, and if you are careless when working on a car like this you can get really sick. Later I decided to take the car completely apart where it was. As I worked on the car I found that it had more rust than I had ever seen on amy car I have restored before. This one will be a challenge!

One goal is that this car one day will look as nice as it does in this drawing from the original sales litterature.

Next page, 2000

Good friends and helpers are here pictured unloading my car at the port of Oslo, Norway.