Fix Or Repair Daily
A 1966 Ford Mustang or a 1966 Ford Falcon? Seems a pretty easy choice for anyone except my Father. I was 17 years old and wanted the Mustang for all the cool reasons, girls being the unspoken number 1. He was 60, a white-haired, long married WWII veteran and hopelessly out of step in my eyes.
The money was going to be mine, bounty from my after-school job selling shoes, but the choice was his because his name was required to cosign the note.
We walked around that Houston used car lot, right past the blue ’66 Mustang like Buster Culver drove, then gratefully sneaking by a couple of station wagons until his eyes lit on The Car!
A 1966 Ford Falcon, beige with 4 doors. No air and no convertible. Beige! Could there be a color that spelled nerd any clearer? The price tag was $895, about $300 less than the Mustang I coveted. I could get a second part-time job to make up the difference…
My dad pointed out the Falcon would get better gas mileage as a six cylinder. I wanted to counter with an argument that there was a gas war going on and the Regular was 18 cents per gallon. But I kept silent, dying inside at the choice, because I didn’t argue with my father. Not because he was an authoritarian. He had spanked me only once I could remember when I had drilled a neighbor girl with a rock after she taunted me that I couldn’t hit her. This was the 1960s and kids were questioning their parents everywhere except in my household. I hadn’t been brought up that way.
So, I got the wrong Ford and the added bonus of “Fix Or Repair Daily”.
“Fix or Repair Daily” was the motto Non-Ford owners sneeringly taunted those driving Henry’s legacies. Mustang drivers could counter with “First On Race Day” and have a valid rebuttal. I had no rebuttal with a Beige Falcon.
The fact I ended up with a Ford was puzzling as Daddy was a staunch Chevy loyalist. My brother-in-law Henry Teague was the Ford man. My dad had just bought a 1969 Chevelle he let me drive sparingly after I got my license. I think the worry about his Chevelle spurred him to cosign for the Falcon.
He even had a story about driving through Tennessee in the 1950s where there was no speed limit and seeing a sign that read: “Speed Limit 100 – Fords do your damnedest!”
My dad came to regret his decision to saddle me with the Ford Falcon. Shoulda Woulda Coulda bought a Chevy!
I quickly determined the only way I could muster any hint of cool with the Falcon was to put surf racks on top. The Falcon had an annoying Ford unique feature of a choke. You pulled the choke and started the car, but you had to let the engine warm or it would die. You didn’t jump in and take off anywhere. This feature, along with a lack of air conditioning in Houston summers, kept my dating life from flourishing when coupled with the Falcon’s superpower.
The Falcon had one superpower. The car had x-ray vision into my bank account. If I deposited a check from the shoe store for $75, something on the car would fail that cost $74.99. I found myself putting all my money in the monthly payments, the repairs and gasoline until I couldn’t afford to date. The beige Falcon was a guaranteed Lonelymobile.
The Fix or Repair Daily/Weekly/Monthly went on until a catastrophic, seismic failure. The transmission stopped transmitting. My dad realized the $150 it was going to cost to fix was beyond my financial resources and so he stepped in and paid to get it rolling again. This started a germ of an idea that would pay off for me handsomely down the road.
In the late Fall of my senior year in high school, after the summer’s heat was no longer a factor, I started dating Gail Knust, a pretty girl who overlooked the shortcomings of my wheels. The summer came and we mostly wore bathing suits and took advantage of 4/60 air conditioning (4 windows rolled down, 60 mph). Things still fell off the car now and then, but the Falcon mostly got us to and from her parents’ Galveston Beach House. When it didn’t, we took Gail’s brand new 1970 Chevelle. Life was good and the shirts with the motto hadn’t even been invented.
Things got complicated when college loomed at the end of the summer. Gail’s brothers and sisters had all gone to Texas Tech and she was headed there also. I had been planning on going to the University of Texas my whole life since I had lived in Austin in 1963 during a Longhorns national championship run. My sister had lived in Lubbock and my girl was going there. I gave up the Orange and White Bevo dream for a man on a horse dressed in a red and black Matador outfit.
Houston to Lubbock is 550 miles and a crow flying can’t save much distance. My dad was the one who did the math and realized the Falcon would probably die on that road, maybe more than once, and the prospect of me being stranded in the wilds of Central Texas worried him.
My dad seemed to trade cars every two or three years. He had a 1961 Bel Air, a 1963 Impala that was the prettiest car he ever owned until a deer impaled its horns through the hood. He then got a 1966 Caprice before trading for the 1969 Chevelle. This was 1971, so the new car itch was tingling, but instead of trading in the Chevelle he decided to trade in the Falcon.
I got the ’69 Chevelle! It wasn’t an SS model and had four doors but had a 307 V8, was Champagne Green and dependable. I would be able to hold my head up in college as I had never been able to do in high school.
The day my dad got behind the wheel of the Falcon to drive it to the Chevy dealership, I gazed less than fondly at my old Beige nemesis. As the two of them pulled out of sight, I silently prayed nothing would break down on the Falcon before he got to the dealership. I was afraid the dealership would back out of the deal if they discovered the Falcon’s superpower.
