Saving a Grasshopper

"Pete said there happened to be a Swiss taildragger in the next hangar for sale. I asked him to get the numbers on the airplane and call me back. He called back and said he didn’t know what this thing was. He figured it was a Swiss copy of a Cub. The data plate said it was a Piper, but he wasn’t certain it was legit. It looked a little bit like a Cub, but it wasn’t really like anything he’d ever seen before. The owner wanted a lot, and it had a 90 hp Continental and it was covered in 10 year old linen. I called Dennis back and he wasn’t interested in recovering a whatever-it-is for a lot. He wanted something that he could jump in and fly for less than a lot. I called Pete back and told him that Dennis was a no-go on this one. He replied that he’d looked at it again and that it was, in fact, a heavily-modified 1944 Piper L-4H, was only painted in Swiss colors, and wasn’t a Swiss built airplane. I had no idea I was an addiction waiting to happen and that my button had just been pushed."