[ bird caws ] i m jamie colby, thrilled to be on my latest adventure, here in san francisco. the woman at the heart of this story also loved to travel and took home the smallest of souvenirs from every place she visited. those tiny keepsakes could add up to abigpayday for her heirs. my name is lise mousel. for over half a century, my glamorous aunt naomi traveled the world in style. she always had a surprise for us, but the biggest one came after she passed away. [ knock on door ] i want to know more about those surprises, so i meet lise and her mother, carol, at the condo where aunt naomi lived for more than 30 years. lise now calls the place home. oh, i love the way it s decorated minimalist. it wasn t always true, when naomi was here. really? yes, there was stuff everywhere. there was furniture and there were antiquities, and then there were the beads. beads everywhere. beads? beads. naomi lindstrom s story begins in a tiny logging town in british c
i m jamie colby, and today, i m in seattle, headed toward the ballard neighborhood. it s an upscale area once known for sawmills and commercial fishing, and just down the road is one man s strange inheritance and a story with a hollywood ending. my name s barry martin. i inherited a tiny, hundred-year-old house from a little old lady. if there ever was a real-estate niche, this is one. hi, barry. i m jamie. hi, jamie. nice to meet you. i meet barry in front of this little house. yep, this is it his strange inheritance. it s just 600 square feet, and it s now surrounded by a huge shopping mall a mall that the unlikely heir in this story helped build. who leaves this to somebody? well, edith left it to me. edith? yep. love to learn more. okay. come on. barry explains that when this house was built over a hundred years ago, ballard, washington, was the shingle-mill capital of the world, with 20 mills producing 3 million shingles a day. there was fis
population roughly 50,000. right here in enid, they have the third largest storage capacity for grain on the planet. but wedged in between enid s silos lies the tale of a cantankerous legend who left his grandchildren with a very strange inheritance. my name is stuart piontek, and in 2003, my brothers and sisters and i inherited something pretty unusual from my grandfather. his name was oliver jordan, and he died at 95. he was a child of the dust bowl. grandpa would hold on to just about everything that passed through his life, whether it was a tin can, an automobile, a piece of copper wire. and oliver jordan kept it all here. for 60 years. this salvage lot was his home, his sanctuary, his fort knox. hi, stuart! welcome to paradise. i found it! the rusted old cars in this shed some of them relics of the roaring 20s are a few of the more than 200 that jordan accumulated over his lifetime. born in 1908, jordan was raised on a wheat farm. but his real interest was
i m jamie colby on a beautiful, snowy day about 40 miles east of telluride, colorado, here to meet a man determined to set the record straight with his strange inheritance, a legendary drag-racing hot rod. my name is danny thompson. when my father was killed, he left me a car named challenger 2 plus a big piece of unfinished business. danny, i m jamie. so nice to meet you. welcome to colorado. inside danny s garage, i get my first look at his strange inheritance. this is challenger 2. this is the beast. oh! challenger 2, a 50-year-old supercharged, piston-powered racecar all i can say is. god bless america and racing, danny! kind of looks more like a spaceship than a car. kind of like a spaceship, trying to make it be as aerodynamic as possible. the story of this racecar starts with this little traffic cop, mickey thompson, danny s dad, born in 1928 in alhambra, california, a boy who loves tools more than toys. he took apart the family washing machine
and today i m in birmingham, alabama, which is in the rolling foothills of the appalachians. they say that wars are fought to change maps, and this episode of strange inheritance is actually about a map, a very old map, and one that survives in a family whose history spans from texas to virginia and then back here to alabama. my name is patrick martin. my parents died in 1999, and my sister and i inherited the house and contents. we were surprised when we figured out what it contained. the house that patrick and his sister, peggy, inherited here in birmingham is now their home. patrick, thank you so much for having me over. it s our pleasure. patrick s parents moved to alabama from maryland and bought the house in the 1960s. patrick, an architect, returns to take care of his ill parents in 1994 but then has his own health scare. i had a quintuple bypass surgery here. patrick s heart trouble leads him to an early retirement at age 47. with lots of time on his han