My Father’s Car
My cousin Bobby is younger than me. Neither of us had brothers, we had sisters. To me, he’s always been my little brother. In an odd dynamic, he’s always looked out for me. Always had my back. It didn’t matter the copious amount of drugs and booze I was consuming, it didn’t matter what hoodlums and thugs I was cavorting with, or what woman I had decided to be madly in love with on any given week, he never judged. I’m sure on more than a few occasions he rolled his eyes and shook his head, but he was always a safe place for me to go. Never as an enabler, there was none of that, more like the absurdity of my life in any given moment just somehow didn’t make it into the conversation.
When I had no friends or money or family that would tolerate me, nowhere to go, or nowhere else to run and hide, I could go find Bobby and we’d talk about music and cars and girls and these new things coming out called computers. He got me my first job in technology, when I was about a year into substance abuse recovery and didn’t know a PC or a Mac from a can opener, but he helped me fake it and somehow we’ve both managed to fake our way through this mess we call technology for the past thirty some years.
We share an abiding and profound love of cars. We got this from our dads. I still remember details about the first car he built up, a ‘63 Chevy Impala with a 283 engine and the classic twelve bolt Chevy rear-end. All those fine chrome racing parts sitting on top of the Detroit iron. It was more than beautiful, it was right. It answered a calling from somewhere past. The calling came from our fathers. My dad and Bob’s dad were Ford guys, who occasionally strayed to the Chevy side. Men of their generation were defined by their automotive allegiance. That trickled down to our generation, but to a lesser degree.
Most people who know me know I love old cars, classics from another time, another age. Even though modern cars are vastly superior in many ways, they bore me to death. It’s pretty common knowledge to my friends and family that I have a thing for ‘49–‘51 Fords. They’re called shoeboxes. A disparaging name for such a car, but in a way they do look like a box. Not very powerful or particularly attractive, nothing fancy. It was the first postwar American car produced. The first American car to have wheel-wells inside the body, the first without running boards and fenders outside the body. But they mean something more to me. I’ve long held I’d not be here were it not for this car. My dad, a died in the wool Ford guy, took his ‘51 on a drive down to Branchville NJ one day to see his other brother Ben, and he met a pretty girl working a cash register in Ben’s grocery store. The girl at the cash register had a ‘49 shoebox. Somewhere in the next few years I was born. I’d lay down pretty even money I was conceived in the back seat of one of those cars, my guess is my mom’s ‘49, it was a coupe, dad’s was a convertible. I mean, it was the 50s, the hardtop offered a bit more protection from prying eyes.
I’ve been looking for one car, my dad’s car, most of my life. No one seems to know where his ‘51 shoebox ended up. That story died with him long ago.
A lot of people have found cars like his for me, some rotted and ravaged to time, literally needing to be taken off the frame and built from the ground up, from the engine to the tubes in the AM radio. None were ragtops, most weren’t even worth pondering, many more needed a decent burial to let the elements of their metal return to the earth and let time finish the job.
I love turning wrenches, but I’m not sure I’d jump on a project of the magnitude, many of these cars presented to me required, a decade long effort to get it right. I’m reaching the time in my life where time is a finite resource. I need to consider that despite how much fun a build like that might be, and it would be fun to get the grand boy involved with me, the effort required is more than I have to give.
So anyway, yesterday morning, drinking my coffee, on Father’s Day weekend Bobby texts me a link; no comments. It’s a 1951 Ford Custom convertible. It’s not perfect, but the most solid shoebox I’ve ever seen. Not a complete frame up $50,000 restoration, but a car with real solid bones to build on. And it’s local, like a half hour from me.
I cried a little looking at the car. It was dad’s car, even the same color. I remembered everything. Every knob on the dashboard and the way the windows never quite met the rubber of the fabric top. Being four years old sitting inside the wheel well next to the legendary Ford V8 flathead, not realizing part of me would spend the next six decades trying to find that moment again. Me handing my father the wrong wrenches when he asked and him laughing and walking around to me to get the right one. The vast real estate between the rear window and the back seat, where I’d sleep on long trips, before child safety seats were a thing, and seat belts were just uncomfortable things to sit on, buckles occasionally pinching your ass.
I won’t know for certain about this car until I take a magnet to the body looking for hidden body putty, or I hear it start and see if it smokes and if it does, what color smoke.
I’m not much on fate and destiny and all that stuff, but this car Bobby found me on Father’s Day weekend, feels right. I’m going to look at it now…