Long Forgotten Corvette Collection Rediscovered

November 3, 2014
Peter-Max-Corvette-Collection-Exhumed-from-Parking-Garage-Purgatory-PLACEMENT-626x382
Photo: Richard Prince

In 1988, music television network VH1 wanted to raise it’s national profile. To do so, they hired creative TV consultant Peter Cahill. The story goes that Cahill came up with the idea to do a massive giveaway to get everyone’s attention. He was sitting in that famous LA traffic when we conjured the idea of giving away one Corvette from every year since they started making them. Chevrolet launched the Corvette in 1953, so the contest’s launch date in 1989 would mean 36 different Corvettes.

So Cahill started buying up Corvettes. He spent $610,000 of VH1’s money acquiring what reportedly were “drivers,” not collector-quality examples. There were fourteen convertibles and only 11 had a manual transmission. According to legend Cahill drove each one home for 36 days (what a fun job!).

So VH1 had its prize and to recoup the money Cahill spent on the cars it set up a 1-900 phone number to enter the contest. 190,000 people called to enter the first day, and 1.3 million entered overall. At $1.49 per call, VH1 made all their money back in less than two weeks. Lots of people called many times to get many entries, but in the end the winner had called only once. Click next to learn about Dennis Amadeo, the lucky carpenter from Long Island.

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