THE STORY BEHIND MY FAMILY’S MOST STORIED CAR
The car: 1936 Lincoln-Zephyr
The owners: Alfred and Erna Heininger, Burlington, Vt.
The story: When I see this photograph of my American grandparents, I think of Grant Wood’s iconic Depression-era painting of a farmer and his wife, American Gothic. Here is the unstaged, urban version: a businessman, his wife, their streamlined car and a refreshing suggestion, Coca-Cola.
By the time I knew my grandparents, they drove an Oldsmobile and, finally, a Mercury. But the Zephyr is the most-storied car to serve in our family. Since we owned one, the Lincoln-Zephyr has also become a storied car, period. It was the brainchild, we learn in Robert Lacey’s Ford: The Men and the Machine, of Edsel Ford, the artsy son of Henry who also commissioned Diego Rivera’s famous labour- and automotive-themed murals in the Detroit Institute of Art.
Other histories argue Edsel’s midpriced Zephyr — more handsome than the rival Chrysler Airflow — saved high-end Lincoln by actually selling during the Depression.
Exactly when our Zephyr arrived in the family is forgotten, but we can make deductions. Grandma — Erna, on the right in the picture — wrote on the back of the photo, “Milton, Vt. At Schill’s Airport. Alfred and Erna with Lincoln-Zephyr — 1936.”
The year on the number plate can’t be made out, but with World License Plates on the web, we can narrow down the design to a run expiring March 31, 1937.
Which all fits with my uncle Oskar Heininger’s further clue. The car, he believes, was bought new or almostnew. Is it the very one in a publicity photo taken in the Burlington, Vt., Ford showroom, posted online in the University of Vermont’s Louis L. McAllister collection? We don’t know; buying new was not the family tradition.
But reliable transportation was needed. In the fall of 1936, grandpa, Alfred Heininger, next to his wife in the photo, ran for Vermont governor as a Democrat. He lost. The state was solidly Republican. Bernie Sanders wasn’t even born yet.
The campaign was spirited. My Zephyr-driving grandfather favoured building a road called the Green Mountain Parkway, along the length of the range. It might have been nice, like the Taconic or Blue Ridge parkways, but Vermont voters would have none of it.
With election travel done, the Zephyr drove on in streamlined glory, ferrying family through to the end of the Second World War. There is one like it — we don’t know whose — at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich.
Our family recalls the V-12 engine burning more oil than rubber, as do other owners. But also seats “high like chairs,” with “chrome bars around the edge,” well-upholstered with “theatre armrests (and) hassocks for rear passengers’ feet,” as a member of another Zephyr family told Automotive News in 2003.
The Museum of Modern Art later made much of the Lincoln-Zephyr’s “impeccable, studied elegance,” which my uncle Oskar, who grew up with the car and became an industrial designer, would probably streamline to, “liked it then, like it now.”
Show us your candy: Got a cool custom or vintage car? Send us a picture of you and your family with your beauty, and tell us your story. Email wheels@thestar.ca and be sure to use “Eye Candy” in the subject line.