Category: Every car is a story.
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I WAS SHAMED
I should have remembered Proverbs 16:18. For those of you who may not be completely up to speed on your Old Testament verses, it reads, “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.” Not gonna lie, I was feeling pretty good about myself. My abilities. My newly acquired standing in the automotive…
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EIGHTEEN GALLONS OF REGULAR
There are mornings that announce themselves as history, although most of them have the decency to wait until after breakfast. Others begin with somebody looking for the keys, somebody else wondering why the coffee tastes worse than yesterday, and an old man raising the door on a service bay because Tuesday has arrived and Tuesday…
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FORT STOCKTON’S FIRST SPACE PROGRAM
The missile appeared at Earl’s Salvage Yard & Formalwear on a Tuesday morning. Nobody knew exactly when it arrived. This was unusual in Fort Stockton, where the arrival of anything unfamiliar generally became public knowledge before the person delivering it had located the correct address. A strange automobile could rarely make it from Interstate 10…
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WORKING THE BUGS OUT
The first Volkswagen anybody remembered seeing in Fort Stockton arrived on a Thursday afternoon in 1952, although for several years afterward there remained disagreement over whether it had actually arrived or merely been blown in from somewhere west of town. It came east on Highway 290 making a determined little mechanical noise that suggested a…
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THE PONY STILL IN THE BARN
There are certain pieces of news that should not be announced before breakfast. War. Death. A major increase in property taxes. The closing of a favorite restaurant. And, apparently, the possibility that Ford Motor Company might build a Mustang with four doors. Lucinda discovered this shortly after seven-thirty one morning when she walked past the…
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THE CAR NOBODY WANTED
There are certain possessions a family considers priceless right up until somebody asks who is going to take them home. Photograph albums seldom present much difficulty because they fit on a shelf, while wedding rings, military medals and Grandpa’s pocketknife can pass through several generations without anybody having to surrender a parking space. Even Grandmother’s…
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WHAT’S UNDERNEATH?
Fort Stockton, Texas April 1986 April of 1986 was not a particularly reassuring month for anybody who believed things were generally better left unopened. It began, for Fort Stockton purposes anyway, on Monday night, April 21, when approximately thirty million Americans sat in front of their television sets while Geraldo Rivera spent two hours preparing…
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“LEAVE IT TO MOTCAT”
Fort Mayfield was the sort of town where every lawn was trimmed, every mother owned pearls, and every father came home from work at exactly five-thirty wearing a suit that had apparently survived the day without acquiring a wrinkle, a stain or any evidence of labor. It occupied that pleasant portion of West Texas where…
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IT’S FRENCH
The Duvals had lived in Fort Stockton long enough that most people had stopped asking where they were from, a process that had taken a little over twenty years and involved considerably more paperwork, volunteer labor, church attendance, Little League participation, and cautious purchasing decisions than either Doug or Daisy Duvall had anticipated when they…
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PAGE 602
There are few moments in a man’s life when he can reasonably expect his family to come running out of the house simply because he has arrived. Roy Wells believed Thursday, July 24, 1975, was going to be one of them. Seven weeks earlier, Roy had walked into Frontier Ford-Lincoln-Mercury, Home of the Straight Shootin’…