BACK IN TIME
Name
That Car60 REMINISCE.COM * JULY 2018
M
y wife, Theresa, and
I bought this car off
the showroom floor at
Warner’s Auto Sales in
Fergus Falls, Minnesota.
We intended to buy a popular
sedan the manufacturer offered,
but Warner’s was out of them. This
model, though, was built on the same
chassis and had all the sedan features
I was looking for, just in a spiffier
package. This was the maker’s answer
to the Ford Mustang fastback.
Only about 10 , 000 were built in
the year ours came off the assembly
line. It’s one of the first American
cars to have front disc brakes as
standard equipment; it also has
fully reclining bucket seats and an
overdrive manual transmission with
an unusual twin-stick floor shifter.
We ended up buying it as an end-
of-season closeout. While the car
gets pampered now, it was our daily
driver for seven years, and it sufferedthe typical wear and tear of most
family vehicles—and once, a not-so-
typical treatment.
Its only accident happened around
Christmastime a few short months
after we bought it. After attending
a performance of Handel’s Messiah,
my wife and her friends stopped for
lunch at a cafe, and someone backed
into the right front fender in the
restaurant’s parking lot.
The atypical treatment? That was
courtesy of two of our five children.
I walked into the garage one day
to find the car’s back fender covered
with gravel and our 4 -year-old son
and 3 -year-old daughter doing
a soft-shoe routine on top of it.
Fortunately, our local body shop
repaired the damaged finish. And,
incidentally, neither child grew up
to dance professionally, on cars or
anywhere else, although our daughter
has turned out to be very fussy about
her own car. •1
The company
was formed in
a1954merger,
the largest in U.S.
history to that date.2
The original
concept car had
a compact chassis
and was dubbed
the Tarpon.3
CEO Roy
Abernethy
scrapped the
original concept and
had it redesigned
on a midsize chassis.4
Ads said the
model offered
“man-size comfort.”5
The car shown
was built in the
model’s first year.HOW’D YOU DO?
Check your answer
on page 64.CLASSIC
CLUESShowroom closeout turns into a keeper.
FROM DAILY DRIVER TO PAMPERED PET
BY VIRGIL FULTS • MORRIS, MN