It's funny how a guy's perspective can change, as he gets older. I remember, and that's another part of this aging stuff, is how clear an event from 1972 can be, and yet I can't seem to remember what I'm supposed to do today. Getting back to 1972, a friend of mine and I were super heavy into chopping and customizing anything we could get our hands on. One of the things that we really liked to tear into was Corvettes, maybe it was because fiberglass was just so darn easy to work with, or perhaps we must have thought we were actually making them look better.
One day after we had chopped the window divider out of a '63 split-window Sting Ray and had moved on to flaring the wheelwells, out of nowhere my friend Gary stopped the Sawzall, looked right at me, and said, "You know someday we are going to have to put this stuff all back." At first I didn't have a clue what he was talking about-and then it hit me. That em dash, by the way, represents about 30 years time. It was around 2002 when I came to the realization that I was rapidly turning into my dad. The old man in his elder years seemed to have acquired what I thought at the time was an unnatural appreciation for older stock vehicles. Now that I look back and realize that I've left a wide swath of destruction, I'm really beginning to dig the stock stuff.
In early May, Octavio Navvaro at the Ford Motor Company included my name on an e-mailing list for Ford E News, a newsletter intended for motor journalists, and geared exclusively toward brand-new Fords. In it I read about the girl who lives in Healdsburg, California, and is in the Ford commercial driving through Windsor, California, as she discovers the new Ford Edge is a lot nicer than her trendy foreign import was. It kind of tripped me out a little bit. It was only two weeks prior that I had passed through Healdsburg, and drove right past Sanderson Ford. The '54 F-100 that I shot earlier that day for the July cover had been purchased brand-new when Sanderson was the Ford dealer in Petaluma. Heading south on Highway 101 I was talking to my girlfriend on the cell as I blew past the Wal-Mart in Windsor in a brand-new rented PT Cruiser ... Gee, sorry readers, it appears I sort of strayed off on a 100-word tangent. I guess I can do that now that I'm a crazy old geezer. Anyways, as I was beginning to explain about the E News e-mail I received from Ford: I e-mailed Octavio back, and not really expecting a reply I asked if he could put me in contact with someone at Ford's archives to help me with research for future editorial content in CCT. It couldn't have been a half-hour later, when I got a reply back from Octavio stating he would see what he could do. A couple of hours went by, and then I received an e-mail from Dean Weber with an apology stating that he couldn't get right back to me, because he was in a meeting and continued on to ask how he could help. Not exactly prepared for such a rapid reply, I called Dean and sputtered out a question about '56 F-100s and what if anything he could tell me about the buildsheet. Unfortunately, the answer was that the final disposition of a buildsheet, or "traveler" as they were called by Ford, could vary from any one of Ford's many assembly plants. In some cases, Dean told me, they were torn off the vehicle as it left the line, while in other cases the buildsheet might have been left alone.
There was a time when the first thing I would probably do when I bought a used truck was rid it of any unnecessary papers sticking to it-like the buildsheet, or traveler. By the '80s I think I might have smartened up a little bit, but it's been only recently that I've acquired such a thirst for knowing the history of stock '53-56 F-100s.
I think most of you guys are familiar with my Raven Black '56 Big-Window that was on the January 2008 cover. Since I ran the story I've completely chickened out as far as tearing into the truck. That's right, she's going to be returned completely to her original stock condition. Well, maybe not completely. I think I'll drop the ride height a little, and throw on a set of Lakester-type wheels with some wide whitewalls, and then maybe heat-up the 272 a little bit. From there, I might do a few changes to the interior-but for the most part the truck will be completely original ... What do you guys think about a pair of Hushpower glasspacks -John Gilbert