![]() The first T-Bird was a sales success, but bean counters at the top decided the car’s second generation for 1958 should grow from sports car to something a bit more family friendly, so the proportions expanded, seating increased, and so did sales. Bill Boyer was the lead stylist on the new Ford, and by 1953 when the Corvette debuted, the clay models for the Thunderbird were already approved. That same year, Henry Ford II took delivery of a Ferrari Barchetta (that car currently resides in the Petersen Automotive Museum) and if you look closely at it you’ll see some familiar design elements. According to legend, that was a bit of a stretch and immediately thereafter Walker called Dearborn and had them begin work on the new car immediately. But in that brief window of time, some of the wildest and most iconic domestic cars were born.įord exec Lewis Crusoe and VP of Design George Walker were walking the Grand Palais of Paris in 1951 when Crusoe pointed out a small European sports car and asked, “Why can’t we have something like that?”, to which Walker supposedly replied that he already had something in development. Compact cars, pony cars, muscle cars, wagons-the American automakers had a shoe for every foot and that meant the end to the war for full-size futuristic design supremacy. Cars were getting smaller with the now familiar three-box design, and new categories of vehicle were being hatched for every segment of the population. The result was a spate of amazing shapes, long and sleek machines with afterburner taillights and turbine grills. In the early 1960s, as the popular psyche shifted from a focus on the fighter planes of WWII to the rockets of the future, car design swept forward to the new era as well. For some reason those sleek, space-race lines always made me think of JFK’s “Moon Speech” (you know the one) and sitting in the interior with its sweeping console and brushed metal finishes made me wonder what it was like to be an American in a time of such forward looking futurism. Funny thing though, over the course of the next 15 years I ended up getting behind the wheel of some amazing cars (mostly for work but occasionally my own) and no matter what I drove, I couldn’t move on from that Bullet ‘Bird. Then life-and another project car-got in the way, and before I could do much more than drive it, I sold it. The plan was to turn it into a mild custom with a lowered stance, subtle body mods, and maybe a two-tone paint job with some ‘flake or pearl. I slapped some new Coker whitewalls on the Kelsey-Hayes wire wheels, fixed the weird swing-away steering column that tried to swing away while you were driving, and used the low-slung cruiser as a daily driver for nearly a year. The color was a pastel yellow with a cream interior, and the original 390 big-block started right up after a tuneup with new belts and hoses. I towed it home and after some power washing and (a lot of) vacuuming, the car turned out to be pretty nice. Mike and I had a chat about the car (it belonged to an elderly customer who left it for mechanical work years ago and never returned for it), and after some negotiating the Ford was mine. ![]() ![]() Inside, I could barely see the carpet through the thick layer of detritus the creatures living in the car had left behind. To anyone other than Mike the place was a goldmine, and sitting in the middle of all this was a car that caught my eye: a 1962 Thunderbird, in a shade I couldn’t determine because it had two decades of dirt caked on the paint. ![]() He called it a junkyard, but it was actually pretty amazing: old Indy car chassis, pre-war Italian engines, and dropped I-beam axles were stacked up like cordwood. I was there to cover something-I honestly can’t remember what-but got sidetracked and ended up wandering around the fantastic “junkyard” behind Fennel’s facility in Saugus, California. ![]()
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