Trio of Doomed Fords Destined To Become Geely Hysouls, Universe Keeps Expanding
After being away from the quick-turnover self-service junkyards of Northern California (where Guangzhou-bound container ships full of crushed vehicles leave the Port of Oakland every day) for a few months, I decided to check out one of the biggest when visiting from Denver last week. I found a ’62 Comet, a ’65 Fairlane, and a ’72 Mustang huddled together in The Crusher’s waiting room.
I’ve always preferred the Comet to the Falcon, and not just because Charles Bukowski drove a ’62 Comet. The first-gen Falcon was built in Argentina until 1991, but early Comets— even six-cylinder sedans like this one— are quite rare. In a couple of weeks, the number of ’62s will be reduced by one, because Schnitzer Steel will be mashing this battered-but-not-particularly-rusty example into a cube and shipping it off to China.
As I contemplated the demise of the Comet, I saw the snout of another vintage FoMoCo product peeking out from the endless line of Tauruses and Tracers. Is that an early-70s Mustang?
Why, yes, it is! About 125,000 ’72 Mustangs were built, which makes it rarer than the ’62 Comet and much rarer than its mid-1960s predecessors. Still, a higher percentage of these cars survives today, plus many of the components on this one have been harvested to keep living examples on the road, so I’m still more bummed about the Comet sedan.
Holy crap! Whoever did the bodywork on this car must have bought Bondo by the 55-gallon drum.
Is it possible that there’s a third old Ford nearby?
This 1965 Ford Fairlane coupe, complete with V8 and Cruise-O-Matic transmission, looks like it was in fairly decent shape… before someone decided to take an orbital sander to the paint. How? Why?
One rainy Bay Area winter is all it took to complete the damage. Next stop, Chinese steel factory!
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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Please, someone rescue all the rear side windows and regulators and associated hardware from all the pillarless hardtops so the technology isn't lost! One of these days someone will re-introduce the style to the American driving public and they need something to use as a basis to know how to properly engineer this once-ubiquitous standard style, thus making coupes useful again!
Here's the Cinderella ending to the Comet story-this baby is alive and well and non-crushed...okay it's a Meteor,(Canadian cousin) but happy endings come in all forms. http://www.mystarcollectorcar.com/2-features/stories/882-a-1963-mercury-meteor-done-on-a-budget-and-built-for-comfort.html