A VERY VERY SAD BUT TRUE FERRARI STORY...

Our FCA track day at Roelbing Road is comming up Oct 28-30th. Savannah GA is full of stories such as "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil".


Here is another sad and tragic story...

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The tragic life of Bob and Tina Stoddard

From their Monterey Square home, Bob and Tina Stoddard were the toast of Savannah's society. After their son died, their world came apart.


Friday afternoon in a shady corner of Bonaventure Cemetery, a worker unearthed the cremated remains of Robert Wahl Stoddard.

It had been 22 years since this plot of sandy soil was last disturbed.

The crash that sent Stoddard to his grave stunned Savannah: Wahl, as everyone called him, was joyriding with two friends in a new Ferrari on Interstate 16 when the car flipped and exploded in a ball of fire.



The Ferrari melted as it burned at the 37th Street exit. Everyone died.

Wahl was 19, the only child of Bob and Tina Stoddard.

The couple never recovered.

Bob Stoddard stopped throwing the almost-weekly parties at the family's stately Monterey Square townhome. Tina Stoddard stopped hosting the extravagant dinner events, a different wine served with each of the five courses.

The Stoddards shut out their wide circle of prominent friends, Mayor John Rousakis included.

They let their beloved home on East Gordon Street, which had been in her family for three generations, fall apart.

Then they lost it on the courthouse steps.

And finally, this: A few weeks ago, Bob Stoddard died at the foot of the stairs in a rented, gray East Broad Street row house. Tina Stoddard lived with her husband's body for perhaps a week before lying down on the living room couch and passing away. Police do not suspect foul play. He was 73, she 70.

They had once been the toast of Savannah, but it took a curious building contractor glancing in the window to notice their bodies.

And so on Friday, Harold Javetz found himself alone with his wife at Bonaventure, digging up Wahl's ashes and carrying out the final wishes of this tragic couple.

Fast life, society friends

Robert Stoddard and Christina Wahl met in the 1950s in Savannah after she graduated from the University of Georgia and he left the Air Force, where he was a pilot.

He was the adopted son of a salesman, and the family moved frequently.

Christina came from an old Savannah family, her grandfather a prominent doctor. She was an accomplished ballerina, and built extravagant doll houses.

They married in Savannah in 1958, lived in Trustees Garden, then moved to Jacksonville where Wahl was born. Bob was a salesman for Brumos Porsche and other exotic car dealerships.

He worked on the racing team of Ed Hugus, the famed Ferrari driver, and drove a little himself.

They moved into the old family home on East Gordon Street in the 1970s after Tina's aunt died.

They quickly made friends with many of Savannah's wealthiest residents.

He turned Javetz on to cars, and sold him his first Ferrari..

Bob was an avid runner. Taylor Street resident Rick Dean remembers Stoddard driving by his house early in the morning unannounced, honking the horn and yelling at him to put on his running shoes. They had a race to enter.

"No matter how badly he annoyed you, you couldn't help but love him," Dean said. "And because of that, he always had the most interesting friends."

Most of all, Bob loved to entertain. He would invite large groups of friends over, and always kept a well-stocked bar at 3 East Gordon St.

Tina, who had taken cooking classes in Paris, was a gourmet. Friends came over for eggs with caviar, stayed through the day for drinks and then capped it off with a leg of lamb.

Mayor Rousakis would sometimes stop by. So would Mercer House owner Jim Williams, and banker Mills B. Lane.

Bob would hand them a cocktail and say: "Here, have a drink, be somebody." They would write witty sayings on the bathroom wall. Everyone called him Sly Brown Fox.

"To know Bob five minutes, he was your best friend," Javetz said. "Above all, he was a scoundrel. But a scoundrel like no other scoundrel."

Javetz and Stoddard would enter club races at Roebling Road. After the flag dropped at one race, Stoddard cut through trees and across grass, meeting the track on the other side well ahead of the pack.

"He got everyone laughing so hard that they didn't even penalize him," Javetz said.

But he always lacked his wealthy friends' money. Bob never owned any of the fancy cars he sold, and the couple frequently borrowed money from acquaintances to keep afloat.

"If they had any money, they would use it to throw a party," said Edward Hill, who lived across from the couple.

Together again

Tina grew bitter, friends and family say. She grew up affluent, and felt she deserved better.

Her attention focused on son Wahl, who was quickly becoming like his father. He was good-looking and loved fast cars, terrorizing Savannah's streets in a vintage BMW.

"He was a bit of an oddball, but full of life," said close friend Charles Pinckney.

Wahl was a freshman at the Savannah College of Art and Design when his father drove home a new Ferrari he was about to deliver to a buyer.

He let Wahl take it out for a spin.

Wahl picked up two friends. Police said the car was traveling well over 100 mph when it flipped.

"His parents lived life to the fullest, but after Wahl died there was no life to live anymore," Pinckney said.

Pinckney stopped by to see them for years afterward and Tina would break into tears. She saw too much of Wahl in him.

The Stoddards stopped the parties, but kept drinking.

They took out a $300,000 loan, using the Gordon Street home as collateral, to open a Laundromat at Victory and Skidaway - across the street from an existing one.

When it failed, they lost the house. Then the owner of the Ferrari that their son crashed sued.

Bob sold the vintage open-wheeled Indy car he kept in the carriage house to keep afloat.

"After the accident their life went to hell in a handbasket," said friend Meg Svedres. "It was like a black cloud hanging over them all the time."

They moved into a tiny one-room rental near the Pirates' House, where their married life began three decades earlier. Svedres helped them pack up on Monterey Square.

"I was appalled," she said. "Here was this elegant, giant townhouse, and it was in the most awful, horrible condition. I thought, 'Oh my God, I can't believe people really lived here.'"

Except for the kitchen. It was sparkling, she said, filled with the newest restaurant-quality appliances.

Bob worked for several years as a concierge at the condominiums next to the DeSoto Hilton. Then one day he was delivering mail to its residents and couldn't find his way downstairs. He had suffered a stroke.

By the early 1990s, the couple moved to the East Broad Street row house, their only source of income the monthly Social Security check.

Charles Edelen, who knew them later in life, said he and a friend spent Thanksgiving at the home a few years ago.

The food, he said, was wonderful. But Bob couldn't speak, and Tina grew increasingly bitter with every drink, lashing out at the guests.

"Halfway through it had turned into 'Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte's' dinner party," he said. "We just had to get out of there."

Dean and others said they would stop by and knock. Tina would open the chained door a crack, tell them to go away.

Javetz said during the last few years, she frequently threatened to take Bob and jump with him off the Talmadge Bridge. She wanted to be cremated, their ashes added to Wahl's.

And that's how Javetz found himself at the Wahl family plot Friday, alone with his wife and a cemetery worker carrying a shovel.

The worker dug two feet down until he reached Wahl's box of ashes.

Javetz placed Bob and Tina's boxes on top, side by side.

He made a slit in the container to let the contents spill out.

"You know, ashes to ashes," Javetz said.

The worker then quickly filled in the hole.

No gravestone marked their final resting place.

"I still don't have closure on this deal," Javetz said.

"I just can't believe that two people who would live this life would be buried alone like this."

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