Category: Every car is a story.
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LIFE IS A SAFARI. A GRAND SAFARI.
The first time anybody noticed the Pontiac Grand Safari outside Grounds for Divorce, most assumed it belonged to tourists who’d made a navigational error serious enough to involve prayer. The wagon sat crooked beneath the diner sign like a grounded cruise ship from the Nixon Administration. Mesa Tan paint. Fake woodgrain peeling near the tailgate.…
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GOAT BALLS, RADIO WAVES, & A LINCOLN ZEPHYR
By the time Dr. John Romulus Brinkley rolled into Fort Stockton in the spring of 1938, folks had already heard enough stories about him to believe at least half of them. Some claimed he’d cured a man in Oklahoma of arthritis, cataracts, melancholia, and a weak handshake using nothing but goat glands and a bottle…
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A COUPLE WISE ASSES
If you sat long enough at the big round table at Grounds for Divorce, you’d eventually hear every story worth telling twice, and a few that ought to be buried under caliche. This one came in like a dust storm from the north, carried on the back of a certified envelope and the kind of…
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FORT STOCKTON GETS A SIGN
If you’ve lived in Fort Stockton long enough, you come to understand that some things don’t die. They just dim a little, hum quietly to themselves, and wait for somebody with the good sense or poor judgment to plug them back in. The sign showed up on a Tuesday. That alone should’ve raised suspicion. Nothing…
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TWO OF A KIND
By the fall of 1958, Weldon Pike had reached the age where a man either settled down into the shape the world had made for him or else took one last wild swing at becoming the fool he’d always suspected he was capable of being. He was thirty-nine years old, owned a modest feed-and-seed concern…
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LYING HIS ASS OFF
By the time Lucho rolled into Fort Stockton in that old 1950 Ford F-2, folks were already doing what folks in Fort Stockton do when something unfamiliar shows up on Dickinson Boulevard—squinting at it like it might explain itself if you stared long enough, like maybe if you gave it a minute it would confess…
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THE LONG WAY HOME
On Friday afternoon, the Cadillac sat under showroom lights like it had already been forgiven for something. The men at Oil Patch John Deere-Cadillac kept a respectful distance from it, the way folks do around something expensive enough to change their posture. It wore its McKinley Gray Metallic paint like a promise, low and long,…
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THE ROSE AND THE THORN
If you stood on Dickinson Boulevard in 1955 long enough, you could watch a man talk himself into debt. That’s what the showroom at Cactus CHEV-Olds was built for. Big glass, bigger promises, and salesmen who could turn chrome into a moral obligation. Whitewalls, two-tone paint, radios that pulled in stations from Amarillo like they…
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GOLDEN STATE WARRIOR
The first time the old Dodge showed up, Rusty Hammer thought somebody was playing a joke too expensive for Fort Stockton. It was parked crooked in front of Rusty Hammer Hardware just after sunup on a Tuesday, black body dull as stove soot, white roof and front doors looking like they had long since given…
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THE MAGIC BUS
A Sunset Acres Story If you head just a little too far east out of Fort Stockton, past where the pavement starts to second-guess its own commitment, you’ll find Sunset Acres Retirement Village sitting out there like it’s waiting on something that forgot to show up. It’s got a sign out front that was once…