It doesn't seem to matter if it's a Corvette, Harley-Davidson, or an old pickup truck, there always seems to be some guy who will walk up and tell you that he used to have one just like it. The next words that usually babble out of his mouth are about how his wife made him sell it. In reality it's always a pathetic story, but for Mike Browne of Friendswood, Texas, he was lucky enough to be directly involved in a new twist to an old tale.
The saga of "Miss Daisy" began in 1966 when a farmer walked into the Ford dealership in McGregor, Texas, and bought the pretty little red-and-white '66 F-100 shortbed Styleside to be his farm truck. Stereotypically, farmers always seem to buy the cheapest truck they can get their hands on, which is a stripped base model. With the equipment "Miss Daisy" was packing, she was anything but stripped. Under the hood was the optional 352-inch big-block FE engine backed up with a standard three-speed column-shift and a standard 9-inch rearend. In '66 a padded dash became standard, but the factory AM radio in "Miss Daisy" was an option that required the factory to punch out a hole for.
In 1990 the farmer died. After 24 years of service the trusty old "slick" was pushed into the barn and only fired up when the farmer's son got a chance to visit his inheritance. As fate would have it, the farmer's son moved into Mike's neighborhood. In early October 2004, the son mentioned to Mike that he would like to keep the '66, but his wife had told him that he had to sell it. Mike expressed a definite interest, but told him didn't have the coin to buy it.
Mike went back to his house and told his wife and mother-in-law, who just happened to be visiting at the time, all about the truck. Before Mike could say "I really want to buy that old Ford" his mother-in-law shattered all notions of a stereotypical mother-in-law and offered to give Mike the $3,500 he needed to buy the '66 Ford. The rest is history.