After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, scores of East German families in search of a new life flooded across the border in their tiny, rattly Trabants — the spare-yet-iconic cars that were thriftily made for decades in the communist country.
Once across the border, many families abandoned their “Trabis” — which sported sputtering two-stroke engines akin to a souped-up lawn mower and bodies sculpted out of a type of plastic that was reinforced with cotton or wool — leaving them dumped in the streets.
But one man’s trash is another’s treasure.
More than two decades after the last Trabant rolled off the production line in Zwickau, Germany, at least three have found a welcoming new home in Longmont — two with Charlie Bigsby (though one is mostly cannibalized for parts) and one with John Short.
With an estimated 100 Trabants in the United States, Longmont has become an East German car-culture hot spot.
