Then life – and another project car – got in the way, and before I could do much more than drive it, I sold the car. The plan was to turn it into a mild custom with a lowered stance, subtle body mods and maybe a two-tone paint job with some ’flake or pearl. I slapped some new Coker whitewalls on the Kelsey-Hayes wire wheels, fixed the weird swing-away steering column that tried to swing away while you were driving and used the low-slung cruiser as a daily driver for nearly a year. The color was a pastel yellow with a cream interior, and the original 390 big block started right up after a tuneup and new belts and hoses. I towed it home and, after some power washing and a lot of vacuuming, the car turned out to be pretty nice. Mike and I had a chat about the car – it belonged to an elderly customer who left it for mechanical work years ago and never returned for it – and after some negotiating the car was mine. Inside, I could barely see the carpet through the thick layer of detritus the creatures living in the car had left behind. Sitting in the middle of all this was a car that caught my eye – a 1962 Thunderbird, in a shade I couldn’t determine because it had two decades of dirt caked on the paint. Old Indy car chassis, pre-war Italian engines and dropped I-beam axles were stacked up like cordwood, and to anyone other than Mike the place was a goldmine. He called it a junkyard, but it was actually pretty amazing. I was there to cover something – I honestly can’t remember what – but got sidetracked and ended up wandering around the fantastic “junkyard” behind Fennel’s Saugus, California, facility. The unmistakable space-age lines and afterburner taillights of the 1962 Ford Thunderbird. The late Fennel was a renown hot rodder and restorer, most notably for his restoration work for the Blackhawk collection, which racked up nearly 150 class wins at Pebble Beach over a few decades. This was nearly 20 years ago, and I was writing for Rod & Custom Magazine and had gone to Mike Fennel Enterprises for a story. I was first bitten by the bug to own a 1962 Thunderbird when I was standing in the junkyard behind a famous restoration shop.
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