The Story of the Ford Seats

     Bonnie was the horse’s name.  My oldest brother Eric bought her from our neighbors, the Ratliffs. I watched in fascination when “Ricky” handed two twenty dollar bills to Gene, who was sitting in an easy chair in his mother’s house in Limon, crutches at hand, recovering from an airplane crash in which he was the only survivor.  It was the most money I had ever seen!

     Bonnie wasn’t much good to ride for us little kids.  She knew too many mean tricks to unseat a rider, like brushing up against a picket fence or barn wall to crush your leg.  Eric or Dad could ride her because they could jerk the reins around and make her behave.

    My grandparents lived in South Limon a mile or two from downtown, across two railroad tracks and the Big Sandy.  When Grandad died in 1954 after a series of strokes, Grandma found it necessary to drive.  So she traded in an older Ford for a gray (might have been light green) 1950 two door sedan.   It had a three speed transmission with overdrive, and a flat head V-8 engine.

    Grandma was never very comfortable driving, and when she hit a pedestrian while backing away from the curb, she decided her driving career was at an end.  She sold the South Limon house and moved into the upstairs apartment of a house she owned downtown.  She was a block and a half away from the grocery, a half block away from a bakery, three blocks away from her church.  There was no garage and no place for the Ford except on the street.

      Meanwhile, Uncle Ricky turned 16 and got a driver’s license.  Horses were passé.  Bonnie and her young colt went to another neighbor.  I don’t know what the sale price was, nor what he paid Grandma, but essentially, the horses were traded for the Ford.

     It was a great little car, but of course it needed some modifications, the first of which was conversion from single exhaust to dual exhaust pipes, complete with glass pack mufflers.  Montgomery Wards mail order had some of the necessary items, but a J C Whitney catalog soon became the wish book favorite.

    My job in the exhaust business was to manipulate the tail pipe while Ricky lined up header pipe, muffler, installed clamps, hangers, etc.  The original conversion was a big chore, removing the old headers, crossover pipe, and installing two new headers.  This might be where I learned the use of bailing wire and tin can lids for supports and shims.  We always had to start the engine when the mufflers were off, just “to see what it sounded like”.

       The new glass packs weren’t quite loud enough, so two pipes the right size were substituted for the mufflers.  When the law started cracking down on too-loud exhausts, “straight pipes” came off and glass packs went back on.  By the time Ricky was a senior in high school, we could change mufflers and pipes in an hour or two.

    A desired modification that didn’t happen was a “cutout”.  It was a pipe device that fit between the muffler and the header pipe.  It was a gated “Y” that routed exhaust gasses through the muffler when the gate was set one way, or around the muffler if set the other way.  It could have saved us a lot of work if it had been installed in the beginning, but it never happened.

       In my memory, most of this work took place in the dead of winter, both of us lying on frozen ground under the car sitting upon blocks, but I do remember a time or two when we did put it in the shop and fired up the wood burner. 

       Another important addition was fender skirts.  They attached to the fender in front of and behind the rear tires by a system of rods and lever that clamped them on  pretty tightly.  They came primed and ready to paint.  The chosen color:  bright red.   Deluxe skirts extended all the way back to the rear bumper, but they were expensive.  Solution: carefully tape off the area behind the installed skirts and paint that area on the car body red, too.  Looked pretty nice!  I wasn’t called on for help with that.

    Lowering blocks had to be attached to the back axle so the blooey cans (explained below) drug the pavement when the car crossed a dip in an intersection.  The car was always pointing up after that. (I wonder what it did for the headlights?)  Installation required removing U-bolts from back axle and spring shackle to install longer U-bolts needed to accommodate the lowering blocks.  In the first attempt, we got the blocks on the wrong side of the axle. They were to go on top and we put them on the bottom, or visa versa.  Anyway, we did it twice.

      Don’t forget the whitewall tires!  Wards didn’t sell whitewalls?  Can’t afford new tires yet?  No problem.  Break the bead on the tire and install Portawalls between rim and tire.  Lack of an air compressor was a minor problem.  Engineair to the rescue.  Pull a spark plug out of the engine (pretty accessible on the old flat heads), install the Engineair into the spark plug hole, start the engine, . . . and wait a few minutes while it inflated a 15” tire tube.  (Ah the good old days indeed!)

     Other modifications included “blooey cans” (chromed tail pipe extensions), a wolf whistle (drill and tap a hole in the intake manifold, run a wire through the dash, install pull knob), rear radio antennas (one functional with a long chord that had to be routed underneath the car and through the dash, and one a dummy), dual steering knobs (the kind that folded down didn’t whack your wrist when you were cutting kitties), fuzzy dice hanging from the mirror (of course), and a sign on the sun visor (maybe an air freshener?) that showed a caricature man in a toilet bowl with his hand ready to pull the flush handle and the words “goodbye cruel world”.

      We installed a lot of seat covers in those days.  They came tailor-made for your car.  Hog rings came with them and a little pair of pliers to clamp the hog rings shut.  Mom was an expert at it.  I don’t really know who installed the red ones that are still on the seats, but they were brand new in the fall of 1960 when Ricky headed off to Greeley for college. 

    And here the saga of the ’50 Ford comes to an end.  And so did Uncle Ricky’s story, nearly.

      He was returning to Greeley one Sunday evening after a trip home.  In a microcosm of the Titanic-iceberg story, two paths and two destinies crossed.  An inebriated driver was  headed south on Highway 85 as Ricky was approaching Lasalle.  The drunk’s car crossed the median and hit the poor old dolled up ’50 Ford amidship.  The car rolled and landed on its wheels, but it was done for.

      When he recovered, Ricky’s first concern was what to do for a car now?  His buddy Lloyd had a collection of ‘53 and ’54 Fords.  He had removed the engine from a ’53 and the body was in good shape.  A deal was made.  The engine transmission etc. would fit in the ’53.  I don’t remember how the ‘50 got to Genoa from the wrecking yard, but there was a story to that, too.

     A wrecker had towed the mortal remainders of the’50 Ford to a lot in the Greeley area.  When Ricky went to see about moving the Ford, most of its jewelry had been removed, no radio, no skirts, no dice, etc.  When he asked about them, the attendant didn’t know anything.  Never one to back away from a confrontation, Ricky set about searching the yard on his own, the attendant watching him.  He found something, the radio, fender skirts?  I don’t remember what.  He picked it up and as he set out to throw it in his car, he turned towards the attendant who found it prudent to be looking the other way. 

        Ed Berridge soon had the motor and transmission out of the ’50 and into the ’53.  When the ’50 went to its grave in the washout below the dam, it went a skeleton, no engine or transmission, even the gears out of the rear end were salvaged.  Dad took the seats out and put them in the shop.  They were too low for comfort, so he built 2X4 frames to elevate them.  He hung the back of the rear seat to the wall, but the angle wasn’t right, nor the slant of the rear bench, so it never worked as a seat.

                                 

    

    The front seat was self-supporting and was quite comfortable.  Hannah, the German Short hair hunting dog found the front seat almost comfortable.  She found it necessary to claw around some, however, enough to get through the new seat covers and expose the seat springs.

    (She will be forgiven the seat damage for all the exciting times she gave us pheasant hunting, but I’m afraid that due to some of her other traits, her karma is that she will still be a dog the next time around.)

     So the seats have been a shop fixture since the 1960’s.  They would stay right where they are awhile longer but for a friend’s gift(?) of a broken-down player piano.

 

 

  My frugality (tightness, cheapness the Goodwife would term it) won’t let me landfill the seats to make room for a piano.  My ad in the Hemmings Motor News has brought three inquiries and I think the seats will now go to needy Fords somewhere, if we can figure out a way to ship them.

    And so the Ford Seats Saga nears the end.

 

 

    Footnote:  This was written on December 22, 2012 (the day after the world was to end, according to some interpreters of the Mayan calendar).  Starting at noon on the 22^nd, with the remnants of last Wednesday’s “blizzard" all around, I pulled a straight pipe off my ’92 Dodge Dakota pickup and installed a genuine Thrush glass pack muffler.(Temperature was in the 50's.)

     Total elapsed time:  one hour fifteen minutes.  Not bad.  An official Thrush decal in the Dakota’s back window commemorates the event.