STORIES
If our lives are a book, the cars we drive define the chapters.
These are stories featuring cars, trucks, and even RVs that played a role in the lives of the people who owned or drove them. Many are set in Fort Stockton, Texas and involve a cast of characters in and around the dusty southwest Texas town. A lot of the stories are shared around the table at The Grounds for Divorce, where the ‘regulars’ meet.
Pull up a chair and let Lucinda pour you a hot cuppa joe and enjoy.
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THE LAST CONVERTIBLE AGAIN
The 1937 Packard Super Eight Convertible Sedan that came up on Bring a Trailer looked less like an auction lot and more like a ghost of American ambition. The photos caught it standing in the sunlight, its long, sweeping fenders polished deep blue, whitewall tires glowing like a grin too wide to hide. Packard called…
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THE FIBERGLASS GOSPEL
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THE BARON OF PECOS COUNTY
There weren’t many things in Fort Stockton that gleamed. Not the courthouse dome, whose copper had long gone the color of a neglected penny; not the sign at Rex Hall Drugs, which flickered between “EX HALL RU” and “RE ALL UGS” depending on the weather; and certainly not the men who leaned on their tailgates…
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JAGUARS AND JETSTREAMS
The Lucky Lady Lounge sits one block off the courthouse square, in that limbo hour when the sun still pretends it has business out west and the neon says otherwise. Hank was polishing a glass with the same rag he’s been threatening to retire since the Clinton administration, the jukebox was lost in a 1982…
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DOIN’ THE CONTINENTAL
The Continental Solution When the Cattle Baron Hotel reopened its doors, Fort Stockton didn’t quite know what to make of it. The old place had been boarded up for so long that most folks forgot there’d ever been a lobby beneath the pigeon stains. But a handful of investors, drunk on oil money and optimism,…
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A BIRD IN THE HAND
The walnut-paneled conference room at Ford’s World Headquarters looked like the inside of a country club that had given up on good taste and doubled down on power. The carpet was so thick it could hide a Pinto recall. Brass ashtrays gleamed under fluorescent lights. A model of the 1979 Thunderbird, all long hood and…
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KNOX MAGNUS AND THE ZEPHYR ROAD, Part II: Jeep Country and the Battle of Los Angeles
Arrival in the City Los Angeles stretched like a rumor too big to be true. Knox Magnus eased the Lincoln-Zephyr down from Cajon Pass, the V-12 whispering against gravity, the hood ornament drawing a straight line into a basin shimmering with neon and paranoia. The first thing he noticed was light: searchlights wagging over the…
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KNOX MAGNUS AND THE ZEPHYR ROAD, Part I: The Last Lincoln Rides West
The Departure On the morning Knox Magnus walked into Frontier Ford–Lincoln–Mercury, Fort Stockton tilted slightly on its axis. The town didn’t have many spectacles, but everyone agreed this was one. Knox was the kind of man who made you forget what you were doing just to watch him do it instead. Wealthy family, oil money…
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CHAIR FORCE ONE
Angus Hopper’s red ’65 F-100 growled into a diagonal spot outside Grounds for Divorce like it was clearing its throat to give testimony. The morning was the color of Folgers, sun just coming up over the courthouse dome, and Lucinda had the front window propped with a salt shaker to let October ride the room.…
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THE EXACT MOMENT
Stewart Somerville had never been a flashy man. Even as a boy, he’d been the type to smooth out his hair with a damp palm instead of grease and turn in his baseball cards for model rockets. By the time he and Trudy graduated from Jim Bowie High School, they’d been dating long enough that…