So many people go their entire life looking for their gift and never find it.  Lana Newsome was one of those rare ones who discovered she had two while still young enough to make use of both.

Her gifts were what earned her a full scholarship to Texas College for Dramatic and Industrial Arts, where she made the most of her talents in Theater and Industrial Design.  Just as she had been at Jim Bowie High School in Fort Stockton, she became one of the most successful students of her day at TCDIA.  Her success at the school was capped off her senior year when she starred as the female lead in the stage version of Westside Story and also won first place in the Industrial Design Competition for her prototype of a personal massager that would go on to be marketed in the back of female publications throughout the late fifties as the ultimate stress reliever.

In a time when women were generally overlooked in Corporate America, Lana made headlines when she was hired by Ford Motor Company.  Even more surprising was the announcement that she would be heading what was known internally as the “Silk Purse Department”.  This was the area in the basement of Ford World Headquarters that formerly held the Edsel Division, but had recently been turned into the studio where lowly Ford products were magically minted into mid-market Mercurys.

Lana and her team were given a limited budget and strict guidelines.  It was their job to take a basic Ford (the Sow’s Ear), the model of taxi cabs and squad cars, and turn it into a Mercury that could compete with Pontiacs, Dodges, and Oldsmobiles.  The department’s first challenge was the ’61 model year models; the first year that FoMoCo had gone back to sharing engines, wheelbases, and body shells with Fords.

Lana and her team had done a good job by borrowing the six-lite rear end treatment of an Impala and making it work on a Merc.  But for ’62 she pulled out all the stops.

She made the grill convex instead of the concave version of the previous year and gave it the same look as a Lady Remington Razor.  The side profile of the car’s namesake, the Greek God of Speed, was prominently featured on the sail panel of the roof where he could be seen gazing back at the wide birthing-hips of the trunk and rear fenders.

Lana’s crowning touch, however, was creating jet tubes that subtly started at the aft edge of the back window and stretched all the way down the top of each rear fender, ending in tail lights that were exact replicas of the personal massager she’d designed in college.

The Mercury was a hit.  Just as she had turned Shakespeare’s tired old Romeo and Juliette into the modern stage triumph of  Westside Story, she had turned the frumpy Ford into a majestic Mercury; a sow’s ear into a silk purse.

She developed a plan to take the brand even more upscale by styling it to look like a scaled down Lincoln starting in ’65.  Before she could work out all the details, however, she was hired away from Ford by the staff of a one time Hollywood thespian who needed her help in changing him from a B-movie actor into a trustworthy politician worthy of being governor of a large western state.

“Working with what you’ve got, it’s amazing what you can create,” she used to say.  A Scotch Green 1962 Mercury Monterey coupe is a perfectly beautiful example, especially with fender skirts still on.