Horsing around
The enduring allure of Ford’s classic pony car — the Mustang,
Now is the season of the Mustang — at least in literature.
Ethan Palmer, the 17-year-old hero of Running on Empty, a new young-adult novel by Don Akers, is consumed with yearning for a vintage Mustang.
In the realm of non-fiction, we have Hotels, Hospitals and Jails, a newly published memoir by Anthony Swofford, author of a previous military memoir, Jarhead. In this memoir, he confesses to serious Mustang envy. His older brother, he tells us, lost his virginity in the back seat of a “Phoenician Yellow Mustang,” while he himself had to settle for the cab of a Datsun pickup.
“I loved that Mustang,” Swofford tells his brother. “You picked me up at school in it one day. I felt so cool.” His brother replies, “There is no other smell like the interior of a ’66 Mustang. It’s a drug.”
No wonder retired teacher David Gardner says of the Mustang, “It was a young man’s transportation. It was just a fun car for young people.”
I met Gardner last year at a fifth-anniversary party for the residents of the Lincoln Park Retirement Community in Grimsby. To help celebrate, several members of the Niagara Classic Mustang Club showed up with their prize cars. It was a hot midsummer’s day, the perfect setting for a Mustang, the ride for the young at heart, the car of the unending summer.
Over the years, nearly every Mustang has been represented in the club, except the Mustang II. That 1973-’78 model was an attempt to capture the spirit of the original Mustang — the brand had become bigger and heavier with every year that passed — but it ended up a design misfortune. It didn’t help that the Mustang II was based on the infamous Pinto.
Mustang enthusiasts are loyal to the brand, however. “It’s very unfortunate we don’t have at least one of the Mustang II in the club,” laments club member Dale Sensabaugh. His 2006 GT coupe — a muscular, handsomely styled car reminiscent of the iconic Mustang that Steve McQueen drove in the movie Bullitt — gleams in the sun.
Kevin MacCallum’s royal blue pearl metallic 1986 Mustang notchback has a distinctive squared-off back. As it happens, the car’s light body makes it an excellent basis for a drag car, and many such models have been slowly ground to pieces at racetracks. “That’s the way a lot of them have gone,” says MacCallum, the club’s president. “One of the reasons I don’t want to part with this is because I know what will happen.” For those smitten by the first generation of Mustangs, there is Rudi Marczi’s 1968 convertible. A champion Canadian crosscountry motorcyclist in the 1960s and ’70s, Marczi abandoned that sport after sustaining several injuries, and began looking for a hobby that didn’t involve broken bones. He searched high and low for a nice convertible to restore, and finally spotted the Mustang in Beamsville. Ever since then, he’s been working on the car — and pouring money into it. The car is a showpiece with many custom parts. Marczi is a tool and die maker by trade and has a virtual machine shop at home. His basic idea is to keep the factory look and yet make it driveable. He stripped the car down and systematically went to work — the electrical system was upgraded, a modern drive train and overdrive transmission were installed, and he added cruise control, along with four-wheeled disk brakes, a roll bar and many other features. Perhaps the Mustang spirit is best exemplified by the special 40thanniversary edition belonging to Gardner and his wife Donna. “The reason my wife bought this was that I got my first Mustang in 1964,” says Gardner, who was born in 1940. “I was going to teachers’ college in Toronto at the time and driving a VW bug. My wife didn’t like it.” A sensible, red-blooded young man, he dumped the Beetle and bought a Mustang. It isn’t hard to figure why. The Volkswagen wasn’t exactly a babe magnet. The Mustang was Eros on four wheels.
A lot of people their age were doing the same thing, it turns out. The Ford Motor Company had done what every corporation dreams of doing: hit the sweet spot and tapped into a huge market.
Ford sensed that customers such as the Gardners, the advance guard of the baby boomers, were looking for something sexier than say, a Falcon.
For the new consumers, Ford designed an inexpensive “sports car.” Hence the Mustang’s long hood and short rear decks. But the car, as well as having that deepthroated rumble, could seat four.
“It had to be a sports car, but more than a sports car,” former Ford executive Lee Iacocca wrote in his memoirs. “We wanted to develop a car that you could drive to the country club on Friday night, to the drag strip on Saturday and to church on Sunday.”
Mustang magic still works, partly because of its continuity. Since the car was launched at the World’s Fair in 1964, rival “pony cars” have come and gone — the AMC Javelin, the Plymouth Barracuda. But the Mustang, currently in its fifth generation, has never been out of production.
The car inspires optimism. “It’s a good hobby,” Marczi tells me. Economies boom and bust, but summer always returns; bringing blue-sky days perfect for cruising the highways in a Mustang.