Until I was 17 and enlisted, I was a diehard hot rod kid. You know: magazines, model kits, dragging around under the hood and under the family car. It was pure bliss figuring out how it went together and what all the parts of the puzzle were and what they did. But, then I enlisted and being in the military changed all that. Uncle Sam sent me off (with a copy of Hot Rod magazine, Rod & Custom magazine, and Car & Driver) to a fine old university up East to study Chinese.
Missing my high school friends, I wrote to a girl who was in Austin at The University of Texas. I ended up marrying her roommate, whose father was a dentist and collector of Model A Ford automobiles. He had a yard full of 'em, mostly wrecks but all beautiful to me. He was a fine man, and soon I was totally hooked. When we went down to Harlingen I got up at dawn to go sit in a '30 coupe and watch crop dusters spraying the fields. In the afternoons and evening I would sit in the wrecks and sort out what made them alike and what made them different, other than beaucoup rust.
Not long after discharge, I managed to buy my first Model A, a great little '29 coupe in very ragged shape. It is the car I'm sitting in as it is being towed off from where I found it, parked by a dry creek in Austin, with a very unfriendly Doberman staked right beside it. My ex was a patient and tolerant soul, believe me, and put up with a lot of Ford over our years, like tires under the bed and parts squirrelled away all over the house. I had to sell that Model A and a terrific unrestored '28 Special Coupe when we divorced, both of us victims of the Vietnam war.
OK, yada yada yada a couple years pass and I can't get those two Model A Fords out of my mind. Thus, bye bye Honda. I had heard of a Ford in a boat shed in Baytown, Texas. I called the owner and we closed the deal over the phone. All I had to do was get there and get the Model A back to Austin.
What to do? I borrowed a boat trailer and a pickup, drove to Baytown (which is near Houston), winched the Ford aboard, and drove home, wallowing and weaving all the way back. But we made it!
