Oh, What A Feeling When Your Number's Up
The Sunday Age
Saturday September 13, 1997
OVER the phone, the money offers kept getting higher and higher. Six or seven calls over several weeks. It appeared someone wanted to buy Mark Lawson's personalised number plates.
The price in the end - an astounding $100,000.
The cars carrying them were equally astounding. Saved from the tip, they had torn vinyl seats and mismatched body panels, one even had lichen on the bonnet.
They're the sort of cars that lower property values when they park in a street.
But the call was meant to contain an offer he couldn't refuse.
But, in the 1990s, when the ruling philosophy is that everything and everyone has a price, Mark Lawson refused. He refused $100,000.
What sort of number plates could be worth that money? It might have something to do with a word on both - Crown.
Who in Melbourne could fail to notice that it is also the name of a gambling establishment on the south side of the Yarra? Some might even know that, in our constitutional monarchy, it is the term used to describe the government or the state in legal matters. There are another 40 names in the phone book using the word.
But how many remember its use in the early 1960s when an upstart Japanese car maker was trying to break into the markets of the wealthy West?
Toyota had a long manufacturing history that started last century building sewing machines. When their first cars arrived on our shores, they were up against such icons as the EH Holden and the locally made Ford Falcons and Chrysler Valiants.
In an insulated white world, it was a struggle to pronounce "Toyota". "Toh-yoh-tah" the Japanese way came out "Toy-owe-ter." Many stumbled after the "toy" part and who would buy a car called toy anyway?
Mark Lawson didn't live through the era, he wasn't even born then, but he bought his first personalised number plate the year before he was old enough to get a learner's permit. That was "CROWN 1" and then he bought a car to match, a 1967 Toyota Crown, two years older than him.
Last week he bought his 50th Crown, most of them stored on a property in the drier climate near Swan Hill to save them from rust.
"Oh yeah, I'm obsessed," said Mr Lawson. "I love my Crowns. I rescue some from the tip - the one with the 'CROWN 4' plates I got from a wrecking yard in Cooma, it had been completely dismantled and I reassembled it. I even flew to Queensland to get one that was going to be dumped.
"They are my babies. People say I am the RSPCA of old Crowns. You can tell anyone reading your article, if they've got a Crown they want to get rid of to give me a call, 018 381-374."
He finances this grease-smeared love-affair by running a car-repair business in a Mulgrave factory. The land next door is crammed with cannibalised and disembowelled Toyotas sharing space with their extracted vital organs. Wheel hubs, gearboxes, cylinder heads and doors are lined up like meat in a butcher shop.
The most battered of his five Crowns still registered is a 1964 utility that has covered 743,000 miles (1,195,487 kilometres). Another, which he bought last week, had been sitting under a tree since 1986 but started on the third crank. The motor ran smooth enough to balance a glass.
What about the phone calls? He just laughs. "At first this bloke offered me the cost of the plates, $250 each. Then he offered me a couple of hundred bucks, then a couple of thousand. Each phone call the offer kept getting higher. In the end it was $100,000.
"I didn't take any notice of his name because I wasn't going to sell. I would just hang up when he rang. They are mine and that's that."
CROWN JEWEL
Story of a classic
Imported to Australia from 1963 to 1988.
Always expensive, it was one of the first cars to have electric windows, electric aerial and electric overdrive.
Some models came with separate climate controlled air conditioning for front and rear, plus a refrigerated boot.
Current model available in Japan as Toyota's top-of-the-range passenger car.
SOURCE: Mark Lawson
© 1997 The Sunday Age
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