Category: Every car is a story.
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ROCKING THE BOAT
By some measures, Rusty’s recovery took longer than anyone expected. Doctors could chart the healing of bone, muscle, and tissue on clipboards and X-rays. Dr. Pierce Cordis could point to numbers, blood work, and test results that suggested the remarkable patient in Room 308 had beaten odds that would have humbled a casino in Las…
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REBEL WITH A CAUSE
There are decisions a man makes after careful consideration, consultation with his wife, sober examination of the available facts, and prayerful reflection upon how the consequences might affect his family. Then there are decisions involving automobiles. On a Friday evening in the autumn of 1959, A. J. Groves sat at the kitchen table in his…
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THE LAST YEAR THINGS WERE SIMPLE
In the spring of 1959, before anybody in Fort Stockton had heard of compact cars or imagined that a family might someday require more than one television set, A.J. Groves decided it was time to replace the Ford. The Ford was a 1953 Crestline, dark green with a cream roof, bought used during the first…
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NEW WAYS HOME
Nobody in Fort Stockton ever knew exactly where Harold and Eleanor Whitcomb were headed when they left on Sunday afternoons, and after a while they stopped asking. It had become as dependable as church bells, the Dairy Twin closing at nine, and Hairless showing up at Grounds for Divorce before the coffee had finished brewing.…
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BACK AT THE RANCH
On the afternoon Lyndon Baines Johnson ceased being president, the air around him seemed to lose its charge. For five years, wherever he had gone, the world had snapped to attention. Doors had opened before he reached them. Telephones had been answered before they rang twice. Men with stars on their shoulders had leaned close…
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THE LAST FAMILY VACATION
The white 1961 Plymouth Savoy came rolling into Fort Stockton with no particular need to be noticed, which naturally meant everyone at Grounds for Divorce noticed it at once. It was not flashy enough to be admired by people who thought admiration required chrome in heroic quantities, and it was not ruined enough to be…
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HIKING THE HAPPY TRAIL
Bryce Gunnison rolled into Fort Stockton from the west in a 1970 Jeep Wagoneer Custom Special with all the subtlety of a spring hailstorm crossing the Davis Mountains. The Jeep didn’t so much arrive as announce itself. It came rumbling down Interstate 10 beneath a cloud of West Texas dust, its replacement Buick 350 V8…
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SEA DUTY
Benjamin Earl McCall had never expected Fort Stockton, Texas, to prepare him for sea duty. Fort Stockton was not a place that spent much time considering oceans. Oceans were decorative rumors that existed somewhere beyond El Paso and a succession of other places nobody in Pecos County had any serious intention of visiting unless the…
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WAITING FOR PARTS
By the late summer of 1969, the Silver Slipper Supper Club had developed a reputation for aiming considerably higher than its ZIP code suggested it should. It wasn’t that Fort Stockton expected the Rat Pack to wander in looking for supper after getting lost on Interstate 10. It was simply that the owner believed every…