There are automobiles that become valuable because they are rare, automobiles that become valuable because somebody famous owned them, and automobiles that become valuable because somewhere along the way enough people told enough stories about them that separating history from nonsense would require subpoenas.
The 1956 Continental Mark II that spent the better part of two decades beside the marina at Lake Leon managed all three.
It was Cadet Blue, which was already unusual, although practically everything about a Continental Mark II was unusual in 1956. Continental had been established as a separate luxury division of Ford Motor Company, and the Mark II was its only product, a hand-finished automobile introduced at the Paris Motor Show in October 1955. It cost roughly twice as much as an ordinary Lincoln, which was an impressive accomplishment considering an ordinary Lincoln was already beyond the financial reach of most people who knew exactly how much hamburger seventy-five cents would buy. Beneath the enormous hood was a 368-cubic-inch Y-block V8 rated at 285 horsepower, connected to a three-speed Turbo-Drive automatic. Inside were power windows, a power front seat, an AM radio, aircraft-style controls, and enough Light Blue and Medium Blue leather to upholster a respectable Baptist congregation.
This particular one had been ordered for Juan Domingo Perón, President of Argentina.
That much was on the paperwork.
What happened after that depended largely upon whom you asked.
The story that eventually became accepted around Fort Stockton was that Perón had ordered the special Cadet Blue color in memory of his late wife, Eva, who had died in 1952. Somewhere over the years, that perfectly reasonable explanation mutated into the considerably better story that Juan intended to surprise Evita with the car, despite the obvious logistical difficulty presented by Evita having been dead for three years.
Nobody ever allowed that detail to ruin anything.
Fort Stockton had standards.
Accuracy was one of them.
Entertainment was another.
When forced to choose, the town occasionally exercised discretion.
The production paperwork called for the car to be shipped to Ford Motor Company Export Operations in New Jersey for onward movement to Argentina. The special-order Cadet Blue exterior was paired with Light Blue and Medium Blue leather, and the finished automobile carried the sort of presence suggesting that whoever stepped out of it either governed a nation or owned most of one.
Then history got there first.
In September 1955, the Revolución Libertadora overthrew Perón. He fled Argentina, and suddenly the problem confronting Ford was no longer how to deliver one of the most expensive automobiles in the world to a president.
It was how to deliver it to a president who wasn’t president anymore.
According to the Fort Stockton version, the Mark II was already aboard a Ford transport headed southwest. Arrangements had supposedly been made to take it as far as El Paso, where representatives connected with the Argentine shipment would assume responsibility for the remainder of the journey. That was how a Cadet Blue Continental commissioned for a South American head of state happened to arrive in Fort Stockton, Texas, at precisely the moment South American history changed its forwarding address.
The truck driver received his new instructions there.
Do not continue to El Paso.
Unload the Continental at Frontier Ford-Lincoln-Mercury.
Await further instructions.
It was the sort of directive that sounded perfectly reasonable until everybody discovered there weren’t going to be any further instructions.
The driver lowered the ramps.
The Continental came down.
Someone at Frontier signed something.
And international diplomacy went for a beer.
The driver reportedly did much the same thing, spending part of the evening at the Lucky Lady before checking into the Naughty Pine Motel. By sunrise, both he and the transport were gone. The Continental remained behind, sitting at a Ford dealership in West Texas with approximately the same relationship to Fort Stockton as an Argentine naval destroyer parked behind the Piggly Wiggly.
For several days everyone assumed somebody would telephone.
Nobody did.
Then they assumed somebody would send a telegram.
Nobody did that either.
A week became a month.
A month became several.
The dealership eventually contacted Ford.
Ford reportedly considered the matter from the corporate perspective, which was considerably simpler. The automobile had been ordered. The automobile had been paid for. The fact that the man who bought it had subsequently been removed from office was not, strictly speaking, a warranty issue.
The Argentine government had other concerns.
The former Argentine government no longer had a government.
Juan Perón had gone into exile.
And the Continental sat behind Frontier Ford.
There was discussion about sending it back to Dearborn, but that raised the awkward question of who owned it. Ford had received payment. The Argentine government had not ordered it. Perón had, but Perón was no longer in Argentina and apparently had not included a forwarding address for presidential automobiles among the details of his departure.
So everyone did what governments and corporations have been doing with complicated problems since the invention of the filing cabinet.
They stopped touching it.
By then the people at Frontier had developed a different concern. Leaving a car of that caliber behind the dealership seemed vaguely disrespectful. The Mark II wasn’t merely expensive. It was magnificent. The long hood stretched toward an egg-crate grille, the wraparound windshield curved above the cabin, turbine-style wheel covers sat inside wide whitewalls, and the spare tire hump rose from the decklid with the subtlety of a duchess arriving late to church. Even the fuel filler was hidden behind the driver’s-side taillight because apparently people who could afford a Continental should never be forced to look directly at gasoline.
Eventually somebody suggested Lake Leon.
This solved nothing.
It was therefore immediately popular.
The marina had traffic, the Silver Slipper Supper Club next door had dinner, drinks and dancing, and the Continental could be displayed someplace where people could admire it instead of watching West Texas dust settle on an international incident behind a Ford dealership.
So Roger drove it out there.
Not the Roger who would work at Frontier years later.
An earlier Roger.
Fort Stockton has always maintained a municipal reserve of Rogers.
The Continental was positioned where Silver Slipper customers could see it. People walked around it before dinner. They walked around it again after dinner, by which time the car had generally improved and its history had become considerably more interesting.
The first version was simple.
“That belonged to the president of Argentina.”
Technically, it hadn’t.
It had been ordered by him.
Within a few years:
“That was Evita Perón’s car.”
That wasn’t true either.
Then:
“Perón had it built especially for Evita.”
Closer.
Then somebody remembered that Eva Perón had died in 1952.
This should have killed the story.
Instead, it fertilized it.
Because in 1955, after the coup that removed Juan Perón, Eva Perón’s embalmed body disappeared.
That part was true.
Her remains had been removed from the headquarters of Argentina’s largest Peronist trade union by military officers after the coup. For years they were moved from place to place, reportedly spending time in locations as unlikely as a van, behind a cinema screen, at Buenos Aires waterworks and in military intelligence offices before being secretly transported to Italy in 1957 and buried in Milan under a false name.
Fort Stockton eventually learned about that.
And somebody at the Silver Slipper looked out the window.
There sat the Continental.
Cadet Blue.
Light Blue and Medium Blue leather.
Special ordered by Juan Perón.
For Evita.
Whose body was missing.
That was enough.
By Saturday night, the automobile had been intended as a rolling display case for Eva Perón’s embalmed corpse.
Nobody could explain why.
This was considered a minor weakness in the theory.
One man maintained that the power-adjustable front bench seat would permit Evita to be positioned at the proper angle for public viewing. Another pointed out that the air conditioning would obviously be useful in Argentina. A third said the ceiling-mounted vents were particularly significant because they would circulate cold air downward.
That ended the discussion.
There was nothing anybody could add to ceiling-mounted corpse refrigeration.
For the next fifteen years, the Continental remained part automobile, part international artifact and part Fort Stockton roadside mythology. Children pressed their noses against the glass. Newlyweds posed beside it. People coming out of the Silver Slipper after three highballs explained Argentine politics to one another while leaning against a car worth more than their houses.
Somebody knew somebody whose cousin had heard Ford was coming for it.
Ford never came.
Somebody else heard the Argentine embassy had requested it.
Nothing happened.
Another fellow claimed Juan Perón himself had written asking that the car remain exactly where it was until “conditions were favorable.”
He had seen the letter.
Naturally, nobody else had.
Then, in 1971, something genuinely strange happened.
Eva Perón came back.
Not to Argentina.
To Juan.
After sixteen years, her body was exhumed from its secret grave in Italy, transported across Europe and delivered to Juan Perón at his home in Madrid, where he was living with his third wife, Isabel. The remains had suffered damage during their long odyssey, but Eva was once again physically in the possession of the husband who had outlived her by nearly two decades.
The story reached Fort Stockton.
Someone immediately drove to Lake Leon to make sure the Continental was still there.
It was.
This was regarded as significant.
Nobody was certain what it signified.
But significant nonetheless.
Then came 1973.
Perón returned to Argentina. He was elected president again, with Isabel as vice president.
And the Continental disappeared from Lake Leon.
Just vanished.
After nearly two decades of sitting there, the Cadet Blue coupe was gone.
There are coincidences, and then there are coincidences that occur in a town with a supper club.
By the following Friday, Fort Stockton had reconstructed the entire operation.
Argentine agents had come for it.
Obviously.
The car had been secretly transported to Houston.
Or Galveston.
Possibly New Orleans.
It had been placed aboard a freighter.
Juan Perón intended to reunite the Continental with Evita.
The fact that nobody had seen any Argentine agents was proof of how good they were.
There was even speculation about what would happen next. Evita would be placed in the passenger seat, someone decided, because Juan would naturally occupy the driver’s position. Someone else objected that presidents had chauffeurs. This led to an extended discussion about whether a dead First Lady outranked a living chauffeur for seating purposes.
No consensus was reached.
Meanwhile, the real Eva Perón was having problems of her own.
Juan died in 1974. Isabel became president and arranged for Eva’s remains to be returned from Madrid to Argentina. A restoration specialist named Domingo Tellechea was brought in to repair the damage the body had suffered during its years of concealment and burial. The work was conducted at the presidential residence at Los Olivos, where Juan Perón’s closed coffin rested nearby. Plans were discussed for a national monument that would contain both of them.
Back in America, the Continental was undergoing a resurrection considerably more straightforward.
Metal could be repaired.
Leather could be replaced.
Chrome could be polished.
Engines, unlike governments and human beings, generally revealed what was wrong with them when somebody took them apart.
The reunion never happened.
Juan Perón was dead. Isabel Perón’s government was overthrown in another military coup in 1976. Eva’s restored body was ultimately placed in her family’s mausoleum at Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires, five meters underground in a heavily protected crypt designed to make certain that nobody ever carried her off again.
The Continental survived.
Eventually it was restored too, including a repaint in the special Cadet Blue it had worn when somebody in Dearborn looked at an order sheet in 1955 and began building one of the finest automobiles Ford Motor Company had ever attempted.
Which brings us to the troublesome part.
Because if you examine the surviving production order, there it is.
Cadet Blue.
Light Blue and Medium Blue leather.
Special.
Buenos Aires, Argentina.
The paperwork does not mention Lake Leon.
It does not mention the Silver Slipper.
It does not mention a Ford dealer becoming the involuntary custodian of an automobile stranded by a revolution.
And it certainly does not say anything about carrying Eva Perón around Argentina in the passenger seat.
That portion was added locally.
At no charge.
Today, when the story comes up around Fort Stockton, there is always somebody willing to correct it. The knowledgeable person explains that Eva Perón died in 1952, three years before the Mark II was built. Her body disappeared after the 1955 coup, was secretly buried in Italy, returned to Juan in Madrid, later repatriated to Argentina, restored, and finally buried securely in Buenos Aires. The chronology makes the notion that the Continental was built to carry her embalmed remains absurd.
Everyone listens politely.
Then someone asks the only question that matters.
“Well, then why did the car disappear from Lake Leon the same year Juan Perón went back to Argentina?”
There is usually a pause.
Because facts can explain almost everything.
Almost.
Somewhere in the surviving history of that magnificent Cadet Blue Continental are a production order, a serial number and enough documentation to establish where the automobile was supposed to go. There are photographs showing its special paint, its blue leather interior, its turbine wheel covers and the enormous hood concealing 368 cubic inches of American optimism.
And somewhere beneath all that paperwork is another history, accumulated one dinner and one drink at a time beside Lake Leon, where a car intended for a president waited while presidents fell, governments changed, bodies disappeared, dictators returned and the world somehow became stranger than anything the people staring through the Silver Slipper windows could have invented.
Almost anything.
They did invent the corpse in the passenger seat.
Probably.
And if somebody ever discovers an old photograph of that Continental being loaded onto a truck in 1973, headed east with two dark-haired men standing beside it in black suits, I don’t want to know.
Some stories have earned the right to remain parked exactly where Fort Stockton left them.
