WSJ writes about upcoming Goldfinger Aston Martin sale

The Wall Street Journal devoted a part of its front page on June 1 to a feature story about the upcoming sale of one of the Aston Martin DB5s from Goldfinger and Thunderball.

Here’s a portion of the story by Steve Stecklow. He begins by writing about the car’s current owner, Jerry Lee, a Philadelphia-area radio station owner:

Mr. Lee, who is 74, bought the car directly from Aston Martin’s British factory in 1969 for $12,000. He’s now hoping to sell it for millions at a classic-cars auction in London on Oct. 27 and use the proceeds to fund a foundation he runs that focuses on crime prevention.

The last 007 car to go on the market fetched $2.1 million in 2006 from a private buyer. But that Aston Martin never appeared in any Bond film; it was one of two replicas created for publicity purposes; the other is in a museum in Holland.

Mr. Lee’s prized possession, which has original gadgets and appeared in the two movies, will be the first authentic Bond car from that time to go on sale in decades. The only other one used in those movies mysteriously vanished from an airport hangar in Boca Raton, Fla., in 1997.

You can read the entire story by CLICKING RIGHT HERE. While WSJ.com is a paid site, the Journal put this story on the free portion. So feel free to click and read away.

The JFK/007 nexus

We tripped over an interesting essay over at the intriguingly-named Assassination Agnostic, a website for theories about the assassination of president John F. Kennedy.

The article takes its name from the site’s domain, JFK007, and makes some interesting comparisons between Ian Fleming’s immortal literary creation and the all-too-mortal American president.

…the two ambassadors of swinging sixties charm were also two of the Cold War’s coldest warriors. Both were boarding school boys turned navy officers, men who rose in rank to the heights of government service. They were the sort of men all others envied, and all women pined for.

This isn’t necessarily new ground, but the piece goes on to make some fascinating connections between the James Bond novels and American foreign policy, the CIA, and ultimately — tragically — Lee Harvey Oswald. For the student of Fleming’s novels, this is real grist for the mill!

Written by “author337,” the whole article can be found RIGHT HERE. We think you’ll find it intriguing, informative, and thought-provoking. Tell ’em HMSS sent you!