Jardine: News spreads too far, too fast to be called 'local'

Recently, I wrote about a 1950 Chevy Club Coupe that soon will be auctioned off by a classic car dealer who lives in Oregon.

The car had belonged to a Modesto woman who kept it for 12 years before selling it to a Modesto used car dealer, who sold it in 2007. The car has only 437 miles on it.

The Web site Yahoo linked to the column on modbee.com. In about two hours, roughly 390,000 people had read it, and within minutes of the linking I began receiving e-mails from people all over the country.

I mention this to make a point: In the Internet age, there is no such a thing as a purely local story.

Not all that long ago -- maybe a dozen or so years -- what happened in Modesto pretty much stayed in Modesto, unless it was heinous or quirky enough to be picked up by The Associated Press or one of the other wire services.

Now, millions of people have instant access to everything online. Any story can appeal to anyone because it just as easily could have happened to them or in their hometown. And anyone with a computer can respond in the comments string or by e-mail.

Brian VanderBeek's story about Modesto's 5 millionth minor league baseball fan in franchise history appealed to more than 1.1 million readers nationwide.

My column on a Modesto couple who saw their tax preparation documents get lost in the mail drew nearly a million hits on Yahoo, followed by scores of comments and e-mails. A column on two boys from Denair who had the same craniofacial surgeries and became the best of friends drew more than 800,000 reads.

After the June 23 column on the 1950 Chevy, I got an e-mail from an out-of-state reader who wanted to offer me $500,000 for the car.

Of course, a less-principled person might have replied, "Sure. Send me a cashier's check and I'll ship the car to you (yeah, right ... )."

My parents didn't raise me that way, or I'd be vacationing in Europe right now instead of writing this column.

Another reader, in Inverness, Fla., e-mailed to tell me his car story. Anthony Boccaccio's parents paid $5,400 for a new 1961 Dodge Polara convertible in New Jersey in 1962. He drove it for 14 years before selling it for $100 in the mid-1970s. When he sold it, he left old engine parts in the trunk because it wouldn't open.

Seller's remorse set in, he said.

"(I) had been looking for another (Polara) since 1985 but never found one till about 2005, when my brother saw one in ratty condition on eBay and called me," Boccaccio wrote.

The seller listed the vehicle identification number on the auction site. Boccaccio's mother had kept all of their documents. Voila!

"My sister found the original invoice, and it turned out to be my car," Boccaccio wrote. "So I hit 'buy' right away."

He paid $3,000 -- 30 times what he sold it for in the 1970s.

When he and his brother drove to Arkansas to get the car -- now a rust bucket -- the seller apologized for not having an ignition key.

"I said, 'Wait,' and I reached under the glove box and got the little key I put there years ago," Boccaccio wrote.

When he opened the trunk, he found the parts he'd left there decades earlier.

Boccaccio and his brother are putting the finishing touches on his restored Polara.

In last Sunday's column, I wrote about a Modesto man who planned to propose to his girlfriend during a hike up Yosemite's Half Dome. When he popped the question, the ring popped out of the box and began tumbling down the mountain. Fortunately, he recovered the ring and repeated the proposal. She accepted.

That column -- 54,000 views within a few hours' time -- prompted an e-mail from a woman in Johnstown, Pa., who told of her proposal experience, on Valentine's Day. Her boyfriend took her to dinner. She was absolutely dead certain he'd be giving her an engagement ring that night because they were leaving for Florida the next day. An engagement celebration vacation, right?

"So at the end of the dinner, he throws a box on the table wrapped with gold foil and a ribbon," she wrote. "And it was a necklace box. So I said 'thank you' and 'I will open it later.' "

She left the table, had a good cry in the ladies' room and called her sister to commiserate. When she returned to the table, the box was gone.

"He said he would give it to me later," she wrote.

A day or so later, while sitting on a Florida beach, he brought out the same box.

"He says, 'I am gonna try this again without you messing it up,' " she wrote. "So he hands me the box and there in the box was the ring. So after he proposes, he explains he wanted me to think it was a necklace. That way I would be surprised. But to his surprise, I didn't open it cause I was upset."

If they can survive the proposal, I guess they can endure the marriage.

"We are now planning a wedding for May 2012," she said.

Had those stories appeared on Web sites from Inverness, Fla., or Johnstown, Pa., chances are someone in Modesto would have read them, related and responded.

A small, hometown story? It no longer exists.

Jeff Jardine's column appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays in Local News. He can be reached at 578-2383 or jjardine@modbee.com.