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 MAN WHO KNEW EVERYBODY’S NAME
By the time most people in Fort Stockton began thinking of Walter Finch as part of the town itself, he had already spent forty-two years working in a room where nearly everything important arrived as sound. The Texas & Pacific depot stood east of downtown in a place where coal smoke, creosote, dust, and hot…
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UNDER THE RADAR
Fort Stockton, Texas Spring, 1971 There are two kinds of people who move to Fort Stockton. The first kind arrive because they intended to. They found work with the railroad, the schools, the oil companies, the county, or one of the ranches that stretched toward the horizon until they finally surrendered to New Mexico. They…
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ONE OF SEVENTY-SIX
The mistake arrived in Fort Stockton on the upper deck of a Ford transport truck during the first week of November 1959, black paint gleaming beneath a thin coat of road dust and a red-and-white interior bright enough to be seen from the courthouse steps. It was a 1960 Edsel Ranger convertible, one of the…
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GIVING THE FAIRLANE THE BOOT
Sometimes a confluence of events takes place that paves the road toward something you hadn’t planned. Something that ends up working out in the greater scheme of things, but wasn’t part of the original blueprint. Let’s back up. I recently made the decision to sign up for several classic car tours across Texas. The Fairlane…
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SHIFTS & GIGGLES
The Burgundy Pearl sedan sat alone beneath the fluorescent lights of the General Motors Executive Garage, looking less like an invading army than a car somebody’s dentist might have driven to a Rotary Club luncheon. It had no towering grille, no hood ornament, no landau bars, no padded roof, no wire wheel covers, no gold-plated…
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FOLDING THE SKY
Nobody in Fort Stockton had ever accused Earl’s Salvage Yard & Formalwear of being overly particular about the distinction between a valuable antique and something the rattlesnakes had simply failed to finish eating. Earl himself maintained that every object on the property possessed either historical significance or usable parts, and since he was the only…
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THE LOAD IT COULDN’T CARRY
The 1947 Studebaker M16 arrived in Fort Stockton on the back of a modern automobile transporter, which offended almost everyone who saw it. A truck that large, upright, and plainly capable of carrying a courthouse should not have been carried by anything. It should have come lumbering down Highway 285 under its own power, its…
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THE LONGEST RIDE TO PROM
Nobody in Fort Stockton ever knew exactly where Earl got the Mustang limousine, which was fitting because Earl had never been burdened by the need to tell the same story twice. If you caught him on a Tuesday morning, while he was dragging a bent El Camino fender across the gravel at Earl’s Salvage Yard…
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ARTHUR AND TILDA
By the time Arthur Archer retired from the Pearl Brewing Company in the spring of 1959, he had spent thirty-eight years learning that anything worth doing could be measured, recorded, scheduled, and improved upon, provided the people involved would quit talking long enough to follow instructions. He had begun at Pearl as a nineteen-year-old loading…
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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…