My first Mercedes was a 300SE coupe the same color as that one except that the roof was gray, the interior was green leather and the wood was burl walnut. I think that all of the SE coupes had chrome rocker panels. Original wheel covers on a 65 should be hub caps and trim rings like on early 113s. The chrome strips on the sides were only on the 300SE coupes and cabriolets. I do not see a power steering reservoir on the car. Do you think that it has "armstrong" steering?
The pictures of that car bring back memories for me. I graduated from college in '68 and like most of my friends, got a "green suit, a gun and a foreign vacation" from my uncle. Instead of the dreaded jungle tour, the Army sent me to be a "cold warrior" in a Nike Hercules battery in Landau Germany. It was great! We were paid well as officers, the Mark was 4 to 1 and the German people were wonderful so we lived very well. When I got there I bought a 63 VW from the next guy to rotate out and started driving around.
The VW was very economical but it was so underpowered and such a deathtrap that I decided in the interest of staying alive to get something faster and safer.
I went down to the Mercedes dealer in Karlsruhe and bought a 63 300SE Coupe for $2500. It had been a $13,000 car 6 years earlier but was a white elephant on the German used car market because it cost so much for a German citizen to license it and put gas in it. We did not have to pay for a tag and got gas stamps for the equivalent of about 23 cents a gallon so it was perfect for me. It was the coolest car any of us had ever seen at the time!
It had originally been an executive perq car for a paper company in Hamburg and although it had about 100K miles it had a new motor so it ran like a bat outta hell. Air suspension, Burl walnut, leather interior, sunroof and a stick shift. At 100 MPH it felt like you were doing 50! What a ride! I was 24 at the time. I shipped it back to the states when I came home in "71 and kept it for about a year.
All told I drove the car about 60K miles and my only expenses were routine stuff.
I needed a station wagon for work so I sold it for $2600 to a guy who was going to fix it up. I might have kept the car except that I didnt have anywhere to work on it and parts were not very available at a reasonable price for it at the time. If it had been a 280SE coupe without the air suspension and a more common motor I might have been able to cope with it. The only flaw it had was that it had some rust from all of the salt they put on European roads and having grown up in salt free New Orleans I was not aware that an "icepick" test should be part of every prepurchase inspection.
Unfortunately, before he got started on restoration, the new owner was driving it around in a heavy rainstorm and got in some high water below an underpass. Some of the water got sucked into the engine and put it in a hydraulic bind. That 300SE motor was so rare that it was not practical for him to fix it so he junked it. The last time I saw it was in a junkyard a couple of years later rusting away and sinking into the ground.
Anyway, that car in the pictures sure looks great. Maybe I'll stumble into something like that some day when I have more time and money on my hands.
Tom Hughes
St. Louis
