COLLECTOR CLASSICS
Land yacht gets Father’s Day relaunch
Father’s Day is over, but the sentiment remains strong with the McConnell family. They gathered around the 1958 Continental Mark III Town Sedan that brought newborn Stellard McConnell home from Royal Columbian Hospital on Nov. 5, 1965. His father Arlen had purchased the big limo-sized Lincoln-built Continental three years before.
Stellard, who is 52, was celebrating Father’s Day with his 81-year-old dad by driving in the family car from long ago. It was the first time the 1958 Continental sedan had been driven any distance since the year of his birth. The destination was the Father’s Day Old Car Sunday in the Park show in Mission. Stellard was an infant the last time the huge car was driven. Once he came home from the hospital in the car, his father pulled the big Continental into the garage of his Coquitlam home on Burke Mountain and didn’t drive it again for more than half a century.
Arlen, a contractor who built firehalls, recreation centres and school additions, had seen that his car was developing some rust issues and an annoying valve lifter noise. And so over the years the aging car gathered dust and boxes that were stacked around it in the garage. With three sons to raise, a busy construction company and two of the 40 acres his grandfather homesteaded on Burke Mountain to look after, the family patriarch rendered the near-20-foot-long Continental sedan a low priority.
He remembers paying the princely sum of $3,500 for the car in 1962 at Black Motors in Burnaby. He traded in a construction truck for the Continental sedan that was nearly as big and probably weighed more. It was Ford’s first unibody car, built without a frame, and weighed a staggering two-and-a-half tons.
Arlen’s car had almost all the options with every window power-operated including the rear “breezeway” window that slid down with the touch of a button. The Shasta Blue car had a dark Seneca Blue roof with matching dark blue leather and cloth interior.
The distinctive canted quad headlights were a design feature not seen on any other car and it was the largest car Ford ever made at just short of 20 feet in length.
At that time, Ford wanted Continental to be its own brand with less expensive Lincolns as companion cars. Ford was trying to trump Cadillac, which outsold Lincoln. The “bigger is better” balloon burst in 1958 when a deep recession hit the auto industry, essentially wiping out Ford’s new Edsel and hitting hard at Lincoln sales.
But Arlen McConnell was still intrigued by the big Lincoln he found on the car lot.
“I had seen them advertised on the Ed Sullivan Show,” he recalls.
He was told the car he bought had been driven by the wife of Vancouver lawyer Tom Campbell, who was mayor of Vancouver from 1967 through 1972.
When asked why he kept the car in storage from 1965 through to last year, more than 50 years, Arlen replies, “I just like the car.”
When he stored it, he filled the engine with a mixture of diesel oil and transmission fluid. Although the gas tank had rotted out and needed replacing and the carburetor needed a rebuild, the old car started up and ran fine. And the annoying valve lifter click clack was gone.
“It runs better now than it did when I put it away in 1965,” Arlen said following the 20-minute drive to Mission from his home on Hatzic Island.
The celebration of the first journey for the huge limosized car in more than 50 years turned into a multi-generational Father’s Day picnic celebration in and around the car.
Plans are to keep it in the family for another half-century or more.