From time to time, collectors showed up in El Paso in search of leads.

John remembers one man from Oklahoma measuring the passenger compartment to see if it would work as a salad bar dispenser in his restaurant.įinally, two men from Mexico bought Orbirton for $1500. The car remained unsold for several years.

The closest city is Juarez, Mexico, just across the border. John bought a Baldwin-Motion Camaro in Mexico and brought it back home. The muscle car era had just ended and what was really hot, for both John and Eddie, were big block Camaros and Corvettes. Then, one day he got caught in the bubble for over an hour and became completely disenfranchised with the wild custom. In an effort to straighten out the carburetors, he recalls cutting off the fuel flow to the outer pair of Stromberg two barrels, which did not use a progressive linkage. He told us the car would hardly go a block and a half before it quit. Today, John is the Service Manager at Shamaley Pontiac, Buick, GMC in El Paso. Excited to drive the famous machine, It wasn’t long before they became disenchanted with the car’s reliability.

They all knew the bubble-top car was a Roth custom. Sid’s brother Eddie Abraham and his nephew, John Attel, a young man still in school but of driving age, got interested in Orbitron. All he could tell us was he might have obtained it in a criminal case. Vic does not remember when he bought the car or from whom. An attorney named Sid Abraham owned the car in partnership with local bail bondsman Victor Apodaca. His good friends Tony and Sergio Aguilar remembered the show car, which featured three headlights offset to the passenger side, parked on Montana street at “Abraham Engineering” in the 1972 – 1975 time frame. Mike did know the futuristic looking custom, which Roth built in ’64, had been last accounted for in El Paso.

Ed roth the orbitron