Category: Every car is a story.
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HOW THE HELL DID THIS HAPPEN?
By the third week of April 1964, the Ford Mustang had become the most dangerous object in Detroit that did not contain enriched uranium. Ford introduced it to the public at the New York World’s Fair on April 17, then bought commercial time on all three television networks the same evening. More than twenty-nine million…
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SIMPLE KIND OF MAN
The Ford Falcon that Lorraine Nolan bought in September of 1969 was not the automobile her seventeen-year-old son would have selected if Ford Motor Company had suddenly appointed him purchasing agent for the family. Danny Nolan had opinions about automobiles, as most seventeen-year-old boys did, but Danny’s opinions tended to arrive fully formed and equipped…
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FORT STOCKTON UNDER COVER
In the spring of 1942, the United States Army became convinced that Fort Stockton, Texas, might be destroyed by the Japanese, which came as something of a surprise to Fort Stockton because most people in Fort Stockton had spent the previous eighty years trying to convince anybody at all that it was worth finding. The…
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STRIPPERS
The word stripper does not mean what it used to mean. I came to this conclusion while reading about the 2027 Ford Maverick XL, which is described as the stripped-down version of Ford’s small pickup. The least expensive Maverick now starts at $29,990, including destination charges, and comes only with a hybrid powertrain producing 191…
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THE OFFER
The Mercedes arrived in Fort Stockton on a Tuesday afternoon with the solemn black shine of a hearse that had recently learned diplomacy. It came east on Dickinson Boulevard at a dignified forty-two miles an hour, which was slow enough for people to study it and fast enough to suggest that whoever occupied the back…
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THE LAST CAR SOLD ON A HANDSHAKE
The black 1957 Lincoln Premiere arrived in Fort Stockton on a Tuesday afternoon in late March, riding the last forty miles on a transport truck behind three new Ford pickups and a pale yellow Fairlane that had already been sold to the county extension agent before its tires ever touched Pecos County pavement. The Lincoln…
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KEYS TO THE BEAST
For seventeen years, the Fort Stockton Mud Hens had managed to avoid the Dixie League playoffs with a consistency that, viewed from the proper distance, almost qualified as excellence. Other clubs occasionally collapsed. Other clubs rebuilt. Other clubs endured a bad season or two before some nineteen-year-old shortstop arrived from Venezuela and carried them somewhere…
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ARE YOU GIVING ME THE BUSINESS?
I have spent an embarrassing amount of my adult life thinking about automobiles that appeared in television programs whose producers never intended for anybody to examine them sixty-five years later. This is one of the burdens I carry. Most normal people watching Leave It to Beaver see Ward and June Cleaver raising two boys in…
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CUBISM, FORT STOCKTON STYLE
The truck arrived at the Grounds for Divorce at nine seventeen on a Tuesday morning carrying four thousand pounds of something that no longer had a name. It had paint, certainly. Most of it was red, though patches of pale blue showed through where entire sections of automobile had been folded across one another like…
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THE UNDERBELLY
Having been shamed into addressing that which is never even seen, I began the process of refurbishing the underside of the Fairlane 500 so that it more closely matched the newly minted trunk and engine bay. The trunk had been cleaned, painted and organized. The engine compartment had received enough attention that I could now…