Our 230S Fintail Update - PeachParts Mercedes-Benz Forum

Mint2Me · #1 01-13-2014, 06:36 PM

Some of you who follow Mint2Me.com regularly know that we own a ’67 Mercedes-Benz 230S Fintail sedan. He is affectionately known around circles as The Colonel. We purchased the Mercedes almost exactly a year ago from a man in Seattle that offered it on eBay. It looked pretty good in the photos and seemed even better after talking with the seller.

Very briefly, the story told to us at the time goes like this. The 230S was purchased by a US Army Colonel while stationed in Belgium. He was transferred to Puerto Rico and took the Mercedes with him. From there, he settled in the Seattle area. The car stayed in the family until the “seller” purchased it from his daughter or granddaughter. Some of that checked out when we received the Owner’s Manual and service book. The car was indeed a European specification car purchased in Brussels and later shipped to Puerto Rico and finally, the Northwest. So we named the big old Mercedes The Colonel – out of respect to the original owner Colonel Swanson. Except there is no Colonel Swanson, he was an accountant.

Now The Colonel has been really popular with invitations to the in the Greenwich Concours, The 100 Cars of the Radnor Hunt and the Sunday at Lime Rock Park Concours. The Colonel is Mr. June in the wildly popular Hooniverse.com calendar and there will be a feature article about The Colonel in the April issue of Hemmings Sports and Classics. Fortunately the true story, still charming, came to light before the Hemmings article.

We received a package in late December from the person we bought the car from. It had a mountain of service records dating back to the early ‘70s. And there was a letter addressed to an Anne Boyleston enclosed. It was from Mrs. Swanson and it was dated 1999. You see the Mercedes was actually Mrs. Swanson’s car after they returned from Puerto Rico until ’99. She loved it and wanted it to go to a good home. She used the Mercedes daily, driving her 4 kids to school, girl scouts, boy scouts and soccer practice. According to her son, whom we found, she became the little old lady in the old Mercedes. By the way, we forgot to mention her first name is Mercedes.

Mercedes died last March and we are sad we didn’t know about her before she passed. Not that she was worried about what happened to her cherished car, but it would have been nice to let her know it was in good hands. Her son was kind enough to send me scans of the original sales documents that his mother kept. So the Colonel isn’t really a Colonel anymore but it was important to a nice family.