USA TODAY International Edition
She still owns the first Mustang ... It’s worth $350K
DETROIT – Tom and Gail Wise disagreed about whether a broken-down car should be stored in a family garage for 27 years or sold for junk. He insisted they keep it because, he promised, one day he would find the time to fix the vehicle himself.
It was her skylight blue convertible Ford Mustang, purchased at age 22 in 1964, that their family of six drove for 15 years. One day, it just stopped running. And there it sat until Tom retired.
When he started hunting for car parts on the internet, he discovered a story about someone with a similar car who claimed to be the very first Mustang owner, with a purchase date of April 16, 1964.
“Tom came to me and said, ‘I think you bought the car a day earlier,’ ” Gail Wise recalled. “And, sure enough, he went down to the basement and found the receipt and the owner’s manual. Sure enough, I had purchased the car on April 15.”
They called Hagerty Classic Insurance, experts on collector cars, and learned a paper trail was essential. “We had everything,” Gail Wise said. “We didn’t know it was anything special. But we kept the new car invoice, the registered owners manual. Tom’s a saver.”
So now, as Ford celebrates production of the 10 millionth Mustang, Gail Wise is back in the spotlight. She was at company headquarters last week and her Mustang will be on display through Saturday in Royal Oak, Michigan.
“It’s like being a movie star at 76,” she said with a tiny laugh. “I felt like a movie star at 22 when I bought the car. I mean, that was 54 years ago, and we’re still talking about it.”
Her story, she notes, is filled with luck and mystery.
❚ “That convertible was for me”: The new third-grade teacher was living at home with her parents on the northwest side of Chicago and sharing her father’s red and black 1957 Ford. But she had accepted a job in the suburbs. So Helen and Cleadis Brown agreed to lend their daughter money for a new car, and they headed to Johnson Ford on Cicero Avenue.
“I told the salesman I wanted a convertible, and he said, ‘I have none on the floor. Come into the back room, I have something special to show you,’ ” Gail said. “There were two Mustangs, one was a hard top. And he didn’t even bother to show me that one. He lifted the tarp, and I knew that convertible was for me.”
Back then, new cars always came out at the end of September, and Ford wanted to shock the world with an April reveal. The company had distributed Mustangs to dealerships around the country so salespeople would have something to show when Lee Iacocca unveiled the car at the World’s Fair in New York on April 17, 1964.
“This was two days before, and it was all top secret,” Wise said. “I drove out of that showroom with everyone waving at me and asking me to slow down. TV ran a lot of advertisements for Mustang, but they never showed the car. They just showed the logo and said, ‘It’s coming.’ For this to be out in April was a really, really big thing. People were so happy, giving me thumbs up, even the police.”
She married two years later, bought a home and used the Mustang as a family car with four kids.
When it stopped running, Tom built an addition onto their two-car garage for the Mustang. Today, the car has just 68,000 miles.
Now the fully restored (but not altered or modified) classic pony car that cost $3,447.50 is worth $350,000 to $450,000, according to Jonathan Klinger, spokesman for Hagerty in Traverse City, Michigan.