Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And if it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first.”- Mark Twain.
A common phrase that you sometimes hear in the car business is that you have to “kiss a lot of frogs to find a prince,” meaning that you have to look at a lot of sad, bad cars to find the real gems. I’m guessing that in the automotive weirdness we’re all dealing with now, it’s even worse…
If you read my post When Mary’s MX-5 Was Miata of the Month, you got to read about some of the Mazda frogs we kissed to find the right Miata for her, including one with shark’s teeth, The toothy Miata shown at left was not that one, this is a much nicer car than that one but the photograph gives you an idea of the effect. If the Miata we looked at was in as good shape as this blue car, I would have played part-time dentist.
We went through a similar process when Mary and I looked for a car to enter in The Great Race, which at that time required cars be of a specific vintage. Originally, I wanted to have a Ford Falcon because of the nostalgia factor but it’s a simple car that should have been able to handle a cross country rallye as well as being easy to fix when the inevitable old car breakdowns occurred. I found an early Futura, similar to my original Falcon, in Minnesota and asked a friend who lives near Burnsville to take a look at it. Not only was it not a real Futura but it was a rust bucket. And that’s one of the challenges of finding an old car that was originally inexpensive; people don’t seem to take care of them.
Then we went looking for a 1958-’60 Thunderbird “squarebird.” In 1958, Ford made 38,000 Thunderbirds and produced 200,000 over the three years the cars of this design. Although I was unable to find the original price of this car (if anybody knows, click Contact and tell me, I’ll send you a nice prize) but they were not cheap. The squarebird frog seen here was nice and was affordable but the cost of making it reliable enough for a cross-country trek was prohibitive for us. And while nicer examples of the hardtop model were available (at the time) those cars was outside our budget for this project.
We ultimately ended up with a 1953 Packard Clipper and while you can read some information about the car in that linked post, there is a “rest of the story…” aspect to our Great Race plans that will have to wait for another time, after the pain is gone.
So Mary and I have kissed a few frogs along the way in our search for automotive nirvana. And that’s kind of where I find myself today. It’s been more than three years since I sold my Mecedes Benz CLA 250. No, I don’t miss it but with all it’s quirks I like it better that driving one of Mary’s three cars. With the skyrocketing costs of even marginal cars it may be a while before I can find a car for myself. If you have any suggestions for affordable and interesting cars, click Contact and tell me about them. Thanks.
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