Cover Girl
Our car was a driver. It was not a museum piece nor was it a "totally authentic nut & bolt" restoration. Even so, it had the good fortune to grace the cover of "The Vintage Ford" magazine for the September/October 1979 issue. It took me a while to find a copy of the magazine, but thanks to eBay, I finally found one.
That would be my dad pretending to fix something under the hood. If you click on the picture, you can get a larger view. If you look extremely closely in the passenger seat, you can see the dark outline of my sister Shannon. You can also see the black running-board box that we used to hold our camping supplies. The straps dangling down from the box were used to tie our sleeping bags to the lid.
The picture was taken in 1975 or 1976. I know that the setting is Heritage Park up in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Heritage Park is kind of a old-time theme park where a turn-of-the-century village is recreated. There are blacksmiths and steam locomotives and stuff like that to see.
At the time, we belonged to the "Foothills Model-T Ford Club", up in Calgary. The club would put on shows from time to time, and at least one of them was up at Heritage Park. One of the big crowd-pleasers during the show was the "speed construction" event. The club had a car that they would lay out on the ground as a giant pile of parts. After someone yelled "Go!", the club members would tear over to the pile and proceed to build a working car from all the parts. We would get timed to see how long it would take to go from a pile of parts to a car that could be crank-started and then go for a drive around the grounds. It only took maybe 5 minutes, as I recall. I also recall getting a face-full of gasoline when I wasn't as fast getting the fuel line connected under the car as the guy was who was turning the fuel valve on.
I should thank all the members of the Foothills Model-T Ford Club for their help in getting our car running again. It's not like we knew what we were getting into when we started working on it. Without their help, we would never gotten the car on the cover, much less back on the road. Special thanks to:
- Gord Watt (a master mechanic, who also got me my first summer job as a "gopher" at NCR while I was in high school)
- John Sylvester (another master mechanic)
- Oscar Simrose (knew everything!)
- Les Schubert (no job was too big!)
- Eric Wilberg (knew all kinds of mysterious things like how to line-bore the main bearings)
- Ray Thomas (our engine-rebuild consultant who we pestered with all kinds of questions)
- Dan Hawken (helped us do an emergency valve-job in Regina, Saskatchewan right in the middle of a road trip)
I learned a lot from these guys.
Mainly, thanks to my dad. My dad was always up for a bit of adventure, whether it was building a boat out of plywood, or fixing up an old car and then letting his two boys drive him around the countryside for thousands of miles and weeks at a time. Looking back on it all, I can't believe all the places we went in that car.
It will be worth it in the end.
Wright Cyclone in full song.