White knuckle start

The more I thought about spending three or four weeks in a 47 year old, un-air conditioned Edsel, across America, in July and August, the more I thought that was a miserable idea. Granted, people drove their cars without air conditioning, in July, in 1960. But they didn’t drive them in broad daylight for days on end, and they didn’t have a good time doing it when it was over 98.6 degrees. I was coming from California, to meet up with Doug Harley’s red Ranger, in Dearborn. I would be crossing Nevada and Utah–some of the hottest desert states in the USA. What’s worse, I would need to cross that desert twice.                   

So, in May of 2007, I turned my Edsel (which has the  VIN of 0U11W702084, and therefore is called 2084 for short, because it is the 2084th 1960 Edsel, Ford was scheduled to build at the Louisville Assembly plant) over to Alex, my master mechanic, to put some kind of off the shelf, modern AC in that vintage car.

That  was not to be. You could buy any combination of after-market AC systems, but you couldn’t mount them in my engine. I had a 292 Y-block configured for a 1960 full-sized sedan. The mounting equipment was designed for fifties Chevys, the 352 series FE block engine, or the Thunderbird version of the Y-block (which mounts its parts on the opposite side of the engine from mine). When Alex called and asked if he could replace my dead stock generator with a Chevy alternator, on the opposite side of the engine, from where the Ford mounts, there was no way in Hell we were going that route. The Edsel is a Ford product, after-all, and despite all the scape-goating the marque gets, it is still a proud member of the FoMoCo family of fine cars. The concept that it would have anything to do with that General Motors low-life, or deviate from stock, was as unthinkable as a member of the Taliban embracing a Jew.

“Then bring me the system and mounting that you want to use,” Alex instructed. He would live to regret those words. There was really only one kind of air-conditioning that was designed to match my particular engine, and that was what the factory installed in the car when they built them new.

But how and where to find such a collection of parts 47 years after the fact? To my rescue stepped Bakersfield Jim. He pointed to a wrecked car, baking in his aptly named Bakersfield back yard. “Every part you need, except the way to mount it in your engine, is in that car,” he told me. And the price was a third of what the new one cost. But I had the same problem with the 1960 Ford Select Air unit as I had with the after-market “Chevy” product. The car it was in had an entirely different engine. It was the more commonly air-conditioned FE block. Nothing that made the AC work in the donor car, would work in mine. I needed an extra belt groove in front of my balancer, and on my water pump, and generator–and I didn’t have them, or have a source to get them. My quest to retro air-condition a stock Edsel 292 seemed about as obtainable by July 15, as a quest to take a stroll on the moon by that date. Every phone call I made to parts suppliers turned up more FE engine or Thunderbird parts. It was as if the Ford 292 version that my car had been built with, didn’t exist.

With only 20 days to go, before I was scheduled to cross the desert, the hand of providence reached out from the sky in a Michaelangelo moment, laying a series of co-incidences down at my feet, that nobody would believe if you had written them in a Hollywood script.

Gettin’ the Groove

Somebody in Tennessee put a mix and match batch of air conditioning parts up for sale on eBay, labeling them Edsel parts (which they were not).

“Look in the background of the second photo,” Bakersfield Jim coached me over the phone. “That’s a Y-block just like your engine, and down at the damper, it has the two extra belt grooves you need to run power steering and AC.”

Of course, those extra belt grooves were not even in the auction being offered. The picture was there to show the compressor, which was. I didn’t need what was in the auction. I needed what wasn’t.

Which is where that finger of providence came into play.

What do you think the chances would be, of somebody in Tennessee, listing an item for sale, for a friend who was actually located in California, about 40 minutes from my house, and that this same California friend was working on a 1960 Edsel at the time I called him. With 2846 of the cars ever made, and more than half of them gone, some people have never even seen one in real life.

But it gets even more bizarre than that. His car was complete except for one item. It was missing tail letters. And I had eight out of ten spares available for his car.

So, once again (with the help of Bakersfield Jim, who knew how to get the dang pulley off the balancer--one wrench and it pops off in your hands) a deal was made. I traded my spare tail letters for his grooves.

The Countdown Begins

But, by this time I had barely fifteen working days before departure. And I didn’t have any of the other parts the car would need to run this thing. Could this still be done? I would ask Alex.

Except he wasn’t at work on Monday or Tuesday. The days were passing, and I was nowhere closer than I had been before, even with the extra grooves.

By Wednesday I was in a medium metallic turquoise funk. I figured I was sunk. (That would be a Sultana Turquoise if you were doing it in a 1960 Galaxie or Fairlane).

There couldn’t possibly be enough time left to install my AC.

I drove by his shop on Wednesday morning, June 27, expecting to see the door still pulled down. But there he was, working on his own car, without a customer in sight. I showed him a collection of reference photos I had taken of a Polar Air car (different under-dash unit, but same engine installation) with my same 292 engine. It, plus the way they were mounted in the donor car, and the fittings from the donor car, would become the text for how it would get into mine. Amazingly he said that he would do it.

My next task was to find Jim, to get the donor car out of his back yard in Bakersfield, and to my mechanic’s shop in Thousand Oaks CA.

But now  Jim wasn’t home.

It took until Saturday, July 1, to get the donor car to the operating theater. There were now only 9 working days to get this 47 year old system transplanted and working, because one of the days was the 4th of July. That wouldn’t have been a problem time frame if it had been a simple “move these parts from car A and put them in car B.” But you couldn’t put them directly in my “car B.”

As I said before, no parts that mounted or ran the donor car’s AC could fit to mine.

A lesser mechanic would have tossed up his hands in frustration, and sent me away. But Alex agreed that he would create a mounting bracket from scratch, and a belt set-up, based on the photos.
He’d regret agreeing to that most of all.
He later described what he had done as a month’s work in 9 days.

On Friday the 13th of July, the system was finally all mounted and ready to test. I stood far enough away to not get hit if some belt snapped and tore a hose off. Alex started my Edsel’s engine and we watched everything run. Nothing wobbled or fell apart, despite that the only factory item mounting it was the grooves I had gotten from the eBay seller.

Then he switched on the AC with a click. “Come here and feel it,” he called me from the front seat of my car. I stuck my head in and got the icy thrill of an Eskimo kiss blowing out from under my dashboard. It was actually running and putting out cold air.

But something was wrong–very wrong. The compressor was getting louder and louder as it ran. It was becoming a baby jackhammer under the hood. That part of the AC would have to be replaced. There was no way I could drive a jackhammer to Dearborn.

And it would have to be replaced before Friday the 13th came to an end because I was leaving on Sunday.

Saturday July 14 was crunch day. There were no more days left. Somewhere Alex had found another compressor. But there were still problems to be solved.

Alex came in to work on a Saturday, a time when his shop is supposed to be closed. At 2 p.m. he handed me the keys, and a case of freon, and spare belts, and a unique tool that was for that system, and extra hoses in case a breaking belt tore a hose.

I had no time to prepare or road test this new set up. He did all the preparation, and I threw my clothes and computer in, with less than 24 hours before I was to depart.

I knew my car was solid and dependable in its old configuration. I had the car since day one (my father bought it brand new,  for my mother to drive me in the kindergarten carpool).

But I had no experience for how my car would behave on such a trip with this new configuration. And neither did Alex. Whatever problems it had would be addressed on the road. Alex gave me his home phone number, just in case, and wished me a great time.

Time to Go

I was supposed to drive to Dearborn with a beautiful Cadet Blue 1960 Edsel Villager (owned by Phil Skinner, with his friend Jere Gauss in the passenger seat). And I started out at the Villager’s house, and we spent the first evening traveling together. It was a thrill seeing that big blue tailgate up in front of me, or seeing the hourglass of the 1960 Edsel grille in my rear view mirror, when I was the front car. But my car had its first problem. A tire blew its tread apart (though didn’t lose air) and their car had the first of what would continue to be a problem throughout its entire trip: it was starving for fuel.

We spent the first night in Jean Nevada, as planned. It was the last time our plans and our actions would match.

Tired in Las Vegas

The next morning, I checked into a North Las Vegas tire store. Bought three tires. (One for the bad one, one for its partner from the same purchase lot, and one to replace the spare in the trunk, which had all its tread, but turned out to be 16 years old–beyond the date when the adhesive that holds steel belts to radial casings, is likely to hold). The crew in the Villager went looking for an electric fuel pump to put on their car, thinking their problem was vapor lock.

We made it all the way to lunch in St George Utah together, but it was hot. My car, having this air conditioner array up front, a transmission cooler in second position, and its dead-stock radiator, now way back in third place, couldn’t cool down when it idled in that kind of heat. The Villager kept stopping as its fuel filter clogged, and I waited for it to start again, then drove the next 200 feet before I had to stop and wait for them to start up again. At some deserted off ramp with no services, I called to them, that I had to pull off for an hour and let my car cool before I fried it. We both pulled off.

The last I saw of the Villager, before it pulled in next to me in the parking lot in Dearborn, was Phil and Jere with the hood open, trying to install this electric pump. Phil said to drive ahead, and they’d catch up to me later. Without the stops, my car could do it. So I headed off, north on Interstate 15, in the heat of the desert, figuring I’d catch them for breakfast in the morning, and we’d be a caravan again.

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2084 did not care for driving a seemingly eternal slight upgrade in 105 degrees. The coolest I could get it to run was over 3/4 of the way to hot. For a little while, that wouldn’t matter but I wasn’t going to be driving 4000 miles with the engine on over-heat like that.

I had no experience with the car and this new AC set up. Alex had driven 2084 up a steep hill at high speed, to be sure it wasn’t too compromised to perform at all, but he hadn’t done it in 105 degrees or for extended times. I was just hoping I wouldn’t blow a head gasket or seize anything, when the Mormon state handed me of their famed miracles: It began to rain. Beyond rain, it began to pour, with drops as big as seagull poop.

My engine temperature went from 3/4 of the way to hot and creeping higher, down to 1/8 of the way up from cold, as the drops of water got sucked into the grille and blasted the radiator, cooling it externally. I completed the state of Utah without ever having an engine temperature higher than 1/4 of the way up the uncalibrated scale. Things would be good when Phil and Jere caught up. I was getting the feeling that my car was its same old tolerant self, with just a little problem if you tried to make it idle extensively when the temperature was 105.

So I followed the written directions, and got to the motel Jere had selected around 10 that night. I discovered our reservations had been canceled. The clerk let me in anyway, at the previously arranged price, since they had vacancies. But I was lost. What happened to Phil and Jere? Hadn’t they left Utah? Weren’t they coming? We were a caravan, doing it together, for both fun and protection–one car could wear the other car’s spare if need be, or go get the other car fuel, or jump start it. Was I driving half way across the country all alone now? That wasn’t what I thought was in the living color brochure in my mind.

My answer came around 2 a.m. The villager had been towed to Cedar City, Utah, where they were looking for somebody to boil out its gas tank.

Heading Off on my Own

When the Villager still wasn’t ready the day after, and I had actually gotten a night’s sleep, I headed east on Interstate 80, across the plains of Wyoming.

Wyoming was free wheeling and seemed to consist of an eternal grade going up. If the whole country continued up at the rate that Wyoming did, I would not get to Dearborn. I would end up on the moon.

Because I was driving a stock 1960 car, I had only an AM radio. I soon discovered that the state of AM radio across America sucks. In each given community there is basically one station you can pull in for 20 minutes, if you are driving 80 miles an hour on Interstate 80, which is what I was. That station plays one of three things: sports talk, Rush Limbaugh, or praise Jesus. There are other stations out there, but they are too fuzzy to come in. The only clear ones are playing one of the above. If you are very unlucky, you find two clear stations in a given stretch of Interstate. And they will both be playing Rush Limbaugh.

I spent the next 1,500 miles of my driving with the radio off.

My next three days consisted of cement Sinclair dinosaur statues, ATM cards, cool air coming from under my dashboard, lunch stops, and breakfast stops, and negotiations with out of the way motels.

I’m half convinced that used car salesmen and motel clerks are the same people. They start in motels, then graduate to selling the cars. If I  pull up to a motel with a great big neon sign saying $38.95 for one person and tell the clerk that I would like a room, am one person, and staying one night, you’d think I’d get a room for $38.95. No chance. It never happens.
The clerk answers back that it will be $49.95 before tax.

But the sign says $38.95, I complain. Those rooms are in the back building, the clerk answers.

I assure her I have nothing at all against the back building. Then she tells me that they are all full.

I tell her that I do not want a $50 room and start to leave.

She suddenly discovers the back building isn’t full any more. She has one room on the second floor that is $39.95. Does this woman get to keep every dollar over the posted room price as some kind of bonus?

Let’s Make A Deal without Monty Hall

The motel with the big electric sign saying “free high speed internet” doesn’t have any. Apparently the previous owners of that dive took it with them when they sold the place to the immigrants who now own it, but they didn’t take their 40 foot sign.
The place where the sign says $25.99 a night tells me the rooms are $40, unless I want the one with no blankets on the bed.
He at least, makes it clear that every room is open to price negotiation. How about $35 for a room with blankets?
Is there such a thing as roadside hotels with actual rates? Apparently not.

My drive to Detroit  takes me through Nebraska, then Iowa, then Illinois and into Indiana. When the speed limit sign says 75, I drive 80 (or at least the fastest I’ll admit in print is that I only drove 80). I may have a lowly Y-block V8, but it is not broken or worn out. If it crept a little past 80, well shucks, this little old antique couldn’t do that, could it? Why it is 47 years old. They couldn’t do that back in 1960. I rehearse my lines for when I get pulled over, but the only officer I see is Andy Griffith and Opie 2007 style.

Maybe I Found Mayberry

I was waiting to be served dinner at some outskirts of nowhere truck stop in Nebraska, when I saw Opie and Andy pull up. Actually what I saw was the county sheriff SUV, which wasn’t that unusual. County sheriffs eat too. But out of the car came a brother and sister, as well as the sheriff, and they all sat down at the table across from me to eat.

The mother of the clan (who I didn’t see get out of that car) also seemed to work for the municipality, because in the middle of dinner she got a cell phone call from some irate constituent who had found the neighbor’s cows on her side of the fence. (Do you really think I could make this stuff up?) A half hour discussion of how often the cow crosses the fence, and if the cow has enough to eat at home, and is happy there, ensues, as Ms Civic Griffith tries to talk the irate woman down.

It takes 2 ½ hours to get a simple sandwich because, the waiter explained to me after I finally get my food, then bill, it seems that was the entire population of the town–the mayor, the sheriff–everyone but the lady with the stray cow, had come in for a town party, just the night that I dropped by.

Opie, Andy, and sister all got back in the sheriff truck and drove off long before I got my food, leaving me to wonder where Barney Fife had been. There were no short, bungling bundles of nerves with a gun in a holster and one bullet in their pocket, among these townsfolk.

I concluded he must’ve been having his dinner with Thelma Lou, before I drove off.

I check the radio again, when I get tired of listening to my engine humming. The only station I can find is talking about prayer. I shut the radio off.

A hundred miles later, I check the dial, and I’ve got Rush Limbaugh. Off it goes again. At the next 100 mile stretch some nationally syndicated host is talking about somebody named Michael Vick, who I never heard of. This Vick gets his jollies by killing dogs. Yuck. Double yuck. I don’t want to listen to THAT. I turn the radio off for another 300 miles.

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When I finally got near Michigan I realized I had a problem. It wasn’t with my vintage car. It was with the calendar and my wallet.
I was four days early because I hadn’t taken the planned caravan route and made their stops. I had pretty much bee-lined straight through.

I couldn’t go to the meet hotel because my wallet couldn’t take four extra days of their prices. I would have to find four days of places to go. Indiana is just as much car country as Michigan. It is full of museums and places where they made cars in the early days. I found a second hand store that was having a half price day in South Bend Indiana, and dropped in to get a new wardrobe. (Hey it can’t all be car related on a trip in a 47 year old car).

And I had figured out the secret of hotel rates–you were supposed to bicker and barter and bluff walking out. (They don’t tell you that in any Zagat guide). Of course my car kind of made looking impoverished impossible. The number one question I got about the Edsel was “what year is it?” The number two question was “is it okay if I take its picture?” And the number three question was “how much is it worth?”

Everyone who saw it concluded it was worth a fortune. I answered the first two questions gladly. I never did answer the third when asked.

When you drive a vintage car across the country, you turn heads everywhere you go. Everyone walks right up and talks to you, or gives you a thumbs up through the window. Kermit the Frog may have lamented how it wasn’t easy being green, but it is very easy being 18 feet long, 81.5 inches wide, turquoise, and have big fins–if you want everybody to pay attention to you, that is.

A Purr-fect solution

Once again, luck was with me. Not only had I not broken down, even once, so far (knock on Dynoc) but I got an e-mail from a resident of Wyandotte–a different suburb of Detroit than Dearborn. Wyandotte Jeff was restoring still another 1960 Edsel.  I even had a package tray for that car, that I was delivering to him.  (Which I had put in the Villager, not knowing that it was going to have trouble all of its trip). Now we had a new suspense–would the Villager actually make it to deliver his tray?

His problem was with his upholstery guy. Wyandotte Jeff was trying to make  the upholstery exactly the way the rare turquoise b-interior is in my car. But the shop was having a problem figuring out how the pieces went together, based on the torn skin (that had been my original seat upholstery before I had a reproduction of it sewn). Would it be possible to drive my car over to the shop some time during the meet, so that he could see the completed interior?
It was only a ten minute drive from the hotel, he assured me, and would only take ten minutes time there.

I made him an offer even better than that. I’ll bring the car in two whole days early, and the guy can look at it as long as he wants, if you give me a floor, or a couch, and access to a toilet until my room reservation starts in Dearborn.

He warned me his house was full of cats.

I assured him that would be purr-fect.

I would now no longer have to play “let’s make a deal” with every future used car salesman motel clerk in Indiana.

I had a great time with Wyandotte Jeff, gazing over the Great Lake into Canada, which I never imagined I could see from almost his house. He introduced me to the Detroit area, and his many Edsels. We even drove around in his 1959 Villager. Of course we took my Edsel to the upholstery shop, where we all figured out why his seat material didn’t make sense when held up to my original: some of the pieces he had been sent were two inches shorter than mine. It couldn’t fit together without the right parts.

When it came time to go to the meet hotel on Tuesday afternoon, my Edsel wasn’t the only party in the duo that had found friends along the way. Only Dave Sinclair of Idaho, in his blue 1959 convertible (who had joined the caravan with the Villager after I departed it) was parked there before my Edsel. I settled in and waited for Doug Harley, who was also scheduled to get there that day, wondering if the Villager would ever make it at all, and bring Jeff his final part for that car.

The Really Big Show

The Dearborn Edsel meet was a flurry of activity with friends from all around the country showing up.
I had told people who had fretted that there wasn’t much of a  schedule detailing what we would do, that we wouldn’t need a schedule of activities because everyone was bringing the party with them, one piece at a time.
I was right.

Phil’s Villager arrived, right on schedule, did some wacky victory laps around the parking lot, and pulled up next to 2084, re-united again. I left my car parked across from the window of my hotel room, as a signal to Doug that I was there, and headed off with Phil, Jere, and the other friends they had found, in that Villager, for dinner. When we got back from dinner the Red Ranger was sitting next to 2084.

Taking the Long Way Home

When it came time to leave Dearborn it had been five nearly sleepless days and nights of wall to wall Edsel viewing, stories, reunions, and films.
But my adventure was only beginning. I was not heading home, but joining Doug’s caravan, for a visit in Pennsylvania, to take my car back to its former parents (who were also my parents), to the towns it had roamed when it was brand new, to the huge Das Awkfest car show in Macgungie Pennsylvania, and to its birthplace at the Louisville Kentucky assembly plant, where it had rolled off the lines on October 14, 1959.

So I joined the Pennsylvania caravan, making a seventh Edsel for the group.
But we weren’t ready to leave Dearborn quite yet. We had two photo sessions we needed to take. The first was at the former Edsel Division building, which we had been trying to figure out how to get to the entire five days, and now had a clue. The second was to Ford World Headquarters (when they were good and closed, so they wouldn’t know that those pesky unwanted Edsels had come back to haunt them).
All seven cars posed in front of where the Edsel Division employees had reported each day for work.

Then we drove off, parade style, to the glass tower, to pose our cars on their display stand.

Doug and I took a side trip to visit the Schneiders and check out their extensive collection of cars–a collection with vehicles that could only have been accumulated by a Ford Motor Company insider.

Home

Anyone who imagines that my bringing the car that had been my family’s primary transportation vehicle from 1959-1967, would be cause for excitement, or even sentimentality, has never met my family.

My father’s comment on seeing his former car again, in his current driveway, for the first time was “That’s a very big car.”
I assured him that it had neither grown or shrank in the thirty years since I had taken it away.

That was about the biggest response as it got.

One Last Destination

In 1999 Doug Harley had taken his Ranger back to the Louisville Assembly plant. A web page is dedicated to that event. This was the one and only chance I would have to take my car back to the factory that it had come from. It was unlikely, given the number of years that it had previously stayed west of the Colorado River, that it would ever again be east of the Mississippi in my life time.

When Doug went there he had randomly dialed numbers in the lobby, until he got a security guard to show him around.
I was coming from too far to take chances on anything happening randomly. I tried the phone number for the Louisville plant, that had been given on the web page, but only got a recording that forwarded to another recording, that forwarded back to the first recording. There was no way to get through to a human with that number any more.

So I went on the internet and looked up a handful of other numbers that supposedly were inside that plant.

The first one a human answered was their Workers Comp department. I explained that I didn’t really have any business with her. I was just looking for public relations, or somebody who could give me a tour. She gave me the phone number of Orville Griffin, one of the nicest southern gentlemen who ever worked for Ford. An appointment was set up for Wednesday.
I was bringing my car back to its birthplace. He warned me that they were in the middle of a heat wave, the likes of which Louisville had not seen in years. The day before it had been 99 degrees.

I was glad that I had gotten the AC installed in 2084. Southern heat and western heat are different kinds of animals. And Southern heat was the kind that sucked the salt water and strength out of you just like a Star Trek monster. Every penny and frenzied minute I had spent, trying to get that together, was going to pay off on my drive home.

I actually got to Louisville, within a half mile of the plant, around 2 pm on Tuesday. By that day it was 102, not a balmy 99.
Since I knew that I was somewhere on the right side of the town, but was clueless as to the exact direction to drive, I found a shopping center to stop in. It had a second hand store too. Inside the second hand store were blue work shirts with embroidered patches from the Louisville Assembly plant. A worker named Steven had donated them. I bought Steven’s entire wardrobe, for me and my friends, as souvenirs of my visit, and asked the local clerk how to get to the plant? “Go to the light and turn right,” she answered. I had randomly pulled over right next to the correct street. I pulled out of that shopping center, turned the corner, and drove over the bridge.

There it was in all its 1955 era glory.

I turned into the employee parking lot, and snapped some pictures of my car and its sign, and its American flag.
Then I went back over the bridge to find a hotel room.

Would it be Monty Hall’s assistant at the desk, or would I get a reasonable price?

There was no sign outside the building, telling what the room rates were, so I have no idea what rate (in the scale of rates they bartered) that I paid. But it was cheap. And it was air conditioned. I was excited to be in Lousville. In the morning, I would see where they made the car. I drew up a sign for my windshield. It said “This car came off the line at this plant on October 14, 1959." I would park it near the front door and put the sign on it, for all who entered to see.

The next morning I parked the car exactly where I had decided, put the sign out, and tentatively walked to the lobby door.

Before I even got in, Orville was there, having seen me pull up. He was setting up a table in the lobby, with t-shirts, that he was giving out to retired plant workers, who would be starting to drop by in a few minutes. If I just sat still and waited. I could talk to the guys who had actually built my car, as they arrived. It was beyond any dream I could have imagined.

Though it is impossible to know if the seven guys I spoke to actually built my specific car or not, because in October 1959 the plant was running on two shifts, and there was no record of which shift my car was built on, or which shift each man had worked that day, the seven men I met had all worked on the Edsels, maybe Doug’s, or maybe Phil’s, if not mine exactly. They had all worked on all three years of Edsel–collectively, at least one of them had probably worked on every Louisville Edsel that survives today.

They’d get a bunch of Fords, and then maybe an Edsel. The cars came down randomly on the line. You just followed the build sheet, they explained, and put what it said went with that vehicle. Two of the guys had been painters. One had been a trim fitter. One had made convertible tops. Another man had been in charge of parts supplies–making sure that if they were building 122 convertibles, there were 122 sets of top bows ready for the assembly workers.

They recounted the last days of the Edsel for me, in grim detail. Earlier that week the parts man had been told the number of Edsels that were to be assembled during the coming days. It was somewhere between 110 and 125. He couldn’t remember exactly after all those years. Then the day came down to make no more, and the order to destroy all the Edsel unique parts on hand, left at the plant, came down.

“Every chicken coop in Kentucky had Edsel floor mats on its floor” he told me jokingly, after he had torn each one in half, and tossed it in the Ford dumpsters.

Two different men also claimed that the very last Edsel built at the plant was sent to the crusher, rather than sold.
Whether that is truth (it would seem to me if Ford couldn’t sell it, they could donate it to some charity for the tax write off rather than waste it) or a taunt told to all Edsel lovers, as sort of an inside joke among assembly workers, I couldn’t answer. I can only repeat what I was told.

But they all agreed that the Edsels they made in Louisville were fine cars, that they were proud of having assembled, and they all seemed to have enjoyed looking over the surviving example of their work from 47 yerars earlier, as they had walked in.

Mother Ford has long had a case of amnesia about her parentage of the Edsel. It has been a forgotten step-child to their other marques. But the workers at Louisville have no such problem. There are pictures hanging in their hall showing 1958 Edsels being assembled. And in their cafeteria, there is a framed purchase order from corporate Ford, to send an Edsel to Dearborn, even detailing its serial number and model.

Exactly how that purchase order got there, would have to be explained by a decorator. That order form could not have come from the archives or offices of the Louisville plant because the early production 1958 Edsel ordered, was not a Louisville plant car. Louisville built the Ford chassis 1958. The purchase order was for a 1958 Mercury-chassis vehicle. But it was a delightful decoration to find on the wall of the cafeteria. I strongly recommend that every visitor to the Louisville plant, stop by the cafeteria, if only to buy a soda from a vending machine. And while you are there, check out the documents on the walls.

I didn’t get to see every aspect of production on the new 2008 SUV’s they were assembling, because the assembly floor has never been air conditioned, and that day was heading for 102. I was told it was just too hot to go into some of the further corners of the huge room, and I believed them. They had stations of water and Gatorade set out strategically for all of their workers, who were on the sweaty lines that day. Paper build sheets have been replaced with computer-generated red light screens. They tell what car you are working on, and what your station puts on it, right at the station. No papers have to found on the car.

When I left the plant I was floating higher than helium balloon. I am glad I made that my last stop, because other events would have been a let-down if they had come after that visit.

But it was time to head home.

Every state in the west was experiencing a heat wave. There was no route I could take where I wasn’t in for 103 degree days every day. So I decided to take the shortest. I filled up with gas at the closest station to the plant, and got on the Interstate.
2084 and I were now headed home. I set my sights on St Louis Missouri. I had to get at least that far before the end of the day, stepped on the gas, and turned that air conditioning up.

To tell the truth, in a car with as much window glass as a 1960 Edsel (or Fairlane or Galaxie) even at full blast, the AC does not completely cool you, because you have so much new heat, beating down.

But it was better than nothing. I tried the radio again, and found some really bad music. At least it wasn’t Rush Limbaugh or Jesus.

Don't Show Me

Missouri had the cheapest gas of any state and was the only state selling sex in neon lights. Lots of states (including Missouri) sold fireworks. But only Missouri sold “Adult Films” and “Adult Toys” every 50 or 75 miles apart. And for each adult toy store, there was a Baptist billboard warning of the dangers and evils of pornography, or giving the address of the local Baptist seminary.

It never failed. Wherever you saw the sex store, you saw these anti-sex billboards.

Missouri nicknames itself the “Show Me State” but I would rather NOT be shown some things.

New Mexico loves their Indians. Everywhere you turn there is another “Indian Trading Store” selling native-American souvenirs such as blankets, pottery,  or beads. In Gallup New Mexico, the tourist trap featured a statue of an Indian out back, and several Goliath-sized arrows around the parking lot. Inside the store, there were items from a tribe that I had never heard of in school. The label on the beaded necklaces spelled out the location of their reservation. It said “made in China.”

Breaking Up Is Hard to Do, said the song, but breaking down is easy

I had my trip out of Louisville mentally budgeted for 5 days. I figured if I drove 400 or so miles each day, which wasn’t an impossible assignment when you have only one driver in the car, I would get home on Saturday night.
On Friday I was almost within range. I figured if I drove just half the night, then got a cheap hotel room, I would have only part of Arizona and California to cross.
So, when dusk fell, I kept driving. I rocketed through Flagstaff (with no clue what speed I was going since I don’t have any working dashboard lights) and figured that I would avoid the big city hotel prices by going to the next suburb, which was Williams.
It was somewhere in Williams that I heard the sound.
It was a rhythmic shwoop-shwoop with a grinding element.
Oh poop, I said to myself–a wheel bearing, a U-joint–a something. I wasn’t going anywhere more that night.
I pulled off in Williams, but could find only a sign that said “Gateway to the Grand Canyon” in the direction I turned.
The last place I wanted to go was any canyon, grand or otherwise. I made a scary U-turn that sounded like my car had rocks in its rear, not tires, and tried the other direction on the road.
In the darkness I saw cabins, and train cars and a cute little house. Best of all I saw a sign that said “Vacancy” in neon. This would be a marvelous place to wake up in, I figured. So, I pulled up to the house, and said I wanted a room. I was in no mood to bargain either. Whatever the future used car salesman wanted, they would get.
“We have no hotel rooms available for tonight,” the woman told me straight faced, suggesting that I try for a different night.
“Then why do you have a vacancy sign lit?” I asked.
“That’s for the spaces in the campground. Maybe there is some space in town for you.”
Town? I hadn’t seen any town in either direction. All I had seen was dark streets without any kind of street lights.
I got back on I-40 for a white-knuckle ride. The sign had said the next town of Ash Fork, was only 13 miles further. Maybe there would be someplace for me there.
Ash Fork seemed straight down from Williams. But it was now late enough that I was usually the only car on the road.
I saw no hotel at the exit in Ash Fork. Instead it had a Mustang gas station. I wasn’t driving a Mustang, and the gas prices were outrageous. But it had a bathroom, and I had a front seat. I would sleep in the car for the rest of the night, and figure out what to do when dawn came. But sleeping at the Mustang gas station was next to impossible.
It seemed to be the social hub for this small camping town. Every few minutes a pick up would roll in for ice, or teens would come by, obviously inebriated with their own late night adrenalin–or something they had swallowed–hard to tell which.

One teen boy spied my Edsel and got all excited. He walked around and around, looking at it. Since I was still trying to work off an over-dose of adrenalin, from that wild ride down the mountain, I wasn’t sleeping anyhow, so I decided to sit up.
That thrilled him. “I found the owner,” he told his friends.
He asked me the questions–what year is it, and could he take a picture. Except he asked a slight variation on the last one because it was probably after midnight by this time–could I please go park it in the light.
I drove it over next to the gas pumps, where the light was as bright as day. He opened his cell phone and gleefully started shooting.
Then he told me about the town.
“They’ll wreck your car in this town, if you try and let them repair it here. Nobody knows what they are doing except the guy at the Chevron station.” He gave me directions to the Chevron station before his impatient friends called to him a third time, to stop playing car-spotter, and get back in their van.

So now I had a place to take it to in the morning. I must have finally fell asleep because I remember waking up when the first light of dawn arrived.

Bug by my Buggy

Ash Fork is one of those towns that has a gas station on both ends and a time warp down the middle. There were buildings from the 1920's or maybe 1930's still standing. Everything was tiny and clearly left over from Route 66's days.
I drove slowly down its one-way main street, hoping the grinding noise of the night before had been part of my imagination. But I had no such luck. The car was grinding worse than ever on that short drive.
At the other end of town I found the station he had directed me to.
The repair station wasn’t open yet, so I decided to go into the souvenir stand and see what that China tribe had been making to sell there. But when I opened my car door, I saw a bug.

Now I’m not a girly girl who panics at the sight of a bug. But this bug was beyond any bug outside of a Godzilla movie. He (or heaven protect us if it was a she, especially a pregnant she) was bigger than my car keys, not just in length, but in every aspect. The only good thing about this escapee from a nuclear test zone, was that it was quite dead. Whoever had seen it previously had squashed it.
The species of insect was Rhinocerous Beetle. And having seen one dead one in real life, I can assure you, I hope to never, ever see one alive.

Stepping gingerly around the Rhino, who was exactly below my car door, I got out and waited, and waited for the station to open.

But he didn’t want to work on my car.

So I drove back to the Mustang station (where this mutant life form wasn’t) and called Triple A. I could have driven the car, but I had no clue where to.

Triple A would figure that out.

Triple A Trailer Queen

I heard somebody shout from the balcony above “hey look it’s an Edsel, it’s really an Edsel,” before I fell asleep for the real night.

I’d like to be able to report some real drama on the final stretch, say the radio playing the William Tell Overture at double tempo, or a thunder storm chasing me from the rear. But the radio was just full of more talk about that animal torture guy, and Jesus, so once again, I turned it off. And the weather was California bright and sunny. It is always bright, clear and sunny in my home state. I don’t know why they even forecast weather in CA.

I stopped for gas twice, and pulled up in my driveway at 2 pm August 12. I’d driven 27 days, through 19 states, had at least 2 million adventures, and really no significant problems with the car. But then, isn’t that how the fine family of Fords are supposed to drive? Even 47 years later, you can drive them from point A to point B (and even C, D, and on to W) if you are so inclined.