Category: Every car is a story.
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BANNED OF BROTHERS
The first Cadillac Gage Ranger armored personnel carrier assigned to the Texas Education Agency had not yet rolled into Fort Stockton, and nobody at Jim Bowie High School, Home of the Fightin’ Knives, had actually heard the sound of military tires coming down Dickinson Boulevard. That was fortunate, because the faculty parking lot was already…
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THE SIX-WHEEL THEOLOGICAL CRISIS
New Guy arrived at the Grounds for Divorce at 7:18 on Tuesday morning driving a six-wheeled Ford EcoSport. This was unusual even by Fort Stockton standards. Not unprecedented, necessarily. Earl once registered a forklift because he wanted to drive it to lunch. Jimmy Don Ventura had spent the better part of one summer trying to…
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FRONTIER FORD BACK WHEN
There was a time when buying a new car was important enough to dress for. I don’t mean the salesman, because the salesman always dressed for it. I mean the customer. A man considering a new Ford might come home from work, wash his face, comb his hair, put on a clean shirt and sometimes…
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TOO BIG TO FAIL
In the spring of 1995, General Motors occupied the sort of executive boardroom where it was possible to spend an entire morning discussing the future of the automobile business without ever getting close enough to an actual automobile to smell one. The carpeting was thick, the table was mahogany, the chairs were leather, and coffee…
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IT WAS THE BEST OF TIMES….
Fort Stockton, TexasMarch 1959 Milton Kessler had been in Fort Stockton for less than six minutes when his automobile drew a larger crowd than he had managed to attract during three days at the American International Toy Fair in New York. This bothered him slightly because Milt sold toys for a living. He had spent…
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IN DEFENSE OF THE FOUR-DOOR SEDAN
The argument began on a Tuesday morning at the Grounds for Divorce, which was when most arguments began there, Tuesday being far enough removed from Sunday for Christian restraint to have worn off and still too early in the week for anyone to have accomplished enough to feel charitable. Lucinda was behind the counter with…
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WHAT COULD GO WRONG?
New Guy announced that he was moving to Washington, D.C., at nine-seventeen on a Thursday morning, which was precisely the sort of hour when a person might say almost anything at the Grounds for Divorce and still have a reasonable chance of being forgiven. The first rush was over, the second pot of coffee was…
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THE LAST GOOD BAD IDEA
By the closing months of 1973, there were mornings when the executives of American Motors Corporation suspected that the only thing keeping the company alive was the fact that the Grim Reaper couldn’t quite remember where Kenosha was. It certainly wasn’t because they possessed General Motors’ limitless resources, Ford’s sprawling dealer network, or Chrysler’s ability…
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THE PEOPLE’S PARADE CAR
Mayor Goodman first learned about the ZIS-110B because Rusty Hammer showed it to him on his telephone at the Grounds for Divorce, which was an innocent enough act at the time and one Rusty would later regret. Rusty had discovered the automobile on Bring a Trailer while looking for something entirely different, and by the…
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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…