My
late father was a Ford man. I
never knew exactly why he had such an affinity for Fords: maybe it was the fact
that his father liked Fords and he grew up with Fords on the farm. Perhaps he
was impressed by the Henry Ford story and emulated Ford’s success. Maybe it was
that in his youth, my father shared some traits with the young Mr. Ford. Like
Mr. Ford, my father was raised on a family farm, and, like him, aspired to be a
mechanical engineer. But as it did with the lives of so many others of his
generation, the attack on Pearl Harbor forever altered my father’s life. He
withdrew from the engineering program at the University of Illinois and
enlisted with the Marine Corps where he eventually became a pilot. 
Whatever
the reason, over the course of his life, my father bought a lot of Fords. He
also told me a lot of stories about his life on the farm before Pearl Harbor,
and these stories were filled with Fords: Ford cars, Ford trucks. “Have I ever
told you about what my brothers and I would do to the Model-A Ford before we
headed in to town on Saturday night?” he would ask. Or, “Your Grandpa Wert had such a way with animals, he
trained a crow to ride on the Ford tractor with him as he did his field work,”
he would say. “That damned crow was so smart, he inched his way closer to the
exhaust pipe for warmth as the air temperature dropped the later we got in the
harvest season.”
Once he was in his story-telling mode there was no stopping
him. He retold his stories, over and over, every time with the same words,
cadence and inflections. Again and again he would recount his Saturday night
exploits- how he and his brothers would mount the mud tires on the Ford truck
backwards so the treads would create a loud rumble as they headed down the blacktop.
He always ended that story with: “The town-folk called us the ‘Prairie
Ramblers’ because of the rumble that truck made as we sped into town.” And Dad would always end his crow
stories with a postscript, explaining how a hired-man brought on to help with
the harvest shot the pet crow bringing about the family’s only war causality.
For some reason in the early 1960s my father broke from
tradition and bought a Chevy. I don’t know whether he succumbed to Madison
Avenue advertising, or if the decision was prompted by mid-life identity
crisis. Maybe the analyst he and my mother were seeing suggested a new car as a
way to spice things up. Evidently,
the analyst himself was driving the coolest little Alfa Romeo, so maybe envy
influenced my father’s purchase, because my father bought a Chevrolet. Not the
sensible full-sized, four-door family car that you would expect for a father of
three, but a snazzy little two-door Chevrolet Corvair.
His
venture away from the Ford family was short-lived. Almost as soon as my father
purchased his first-ever and last-ever Chevy, all sorts of negative news
concerning the safety and performance of this car became public. Because my
father was very safety conscience, it didn’t take him too long to recognize the
folly of buying a Chevy….As a form of penance perhaps, to trade it for a Ford
Custom, the most stripped-down, back-to-basic, no-frills Ford available.
I
think the only features the Custom had that weren’t available on the Model-A of
his youth were an electric starter, a heater and an AM radio. Aside from those
upgrades, this car was basically four wheels and an engine. No power steering,
no power windows, no air-conditioning, no decorative trim, no padded dashboard.
He justified this Spartan purchase by calling it his “airport
car”: because the car had nothing worth stealing, it would be safe to leave it
unattended while he was away.
As an expression of our distaste for this new purchase, we
children nicknamed the car “the Ford Dog" and as a joke, would sometimes
chain it to the flagpole in front of the house with a bowl of water and a bone near the front bumper.
