This is where I spent my childhood back on Long Island. My house is the "Dutch Colonial" on the right and the folks my mother referred to as "hillbillies" lived in the duplex with that white SUV parked just to the right of it. I believe she referred to them as such in large part because the patriarch of the family, who was an auto mechanic, would fix up and sell cars his customers didn't want. All well and good but he'd often do so on the spit of a front lawn in front of their house. His doing so meant they had a constant flux of cars over there. I, of course, and much to my mother's consternation, couldn't get enough of it.
One of the cars I remember them having was a Ford Mustang not unlike this one that's for sale in, coincidentally, Queens, New York for a not unreasonable asking price of $10,000. Save for this car being green and not blue, it's the same car the hillbillies had. Right down to its flaccid, 200 cubic-inch, inline six.
It's hard to imagine the automobile world the Mustang came into. The Big Three were just beginning to offer a full range of models from compacts to full-size cars and there was nothing like the Ford Mustang before its introduction just two weeks after I was born in 1964. And introduced, in of all places, at the New York World's Fair a scant twenty-minutes or so from where I grew up. Therefore, you'd think I'd be all about these cars, right?
I know it's near sacrilege not to sycophantically fawn all over first-generation Mustangs, but I've never gone all gooey over them. You would think that I would what with it being a coupe and all but I find they come up short in the "gotta-have-it" department, I see this for what it is - a tarted up Falcon. Perhaps if it was a larger car I'd feel differently; some designs simply need a larger canvas. A number of critics at the time did deride the styling as dated and the proportions being somewhat out of whack. However, seeing that Ford sold over 1.4-million first generation Mustangs, I'm apparently in the minority with my sentiment. Then again, not only was there nothing like the Mustang before it, but they had that market all but to itself through the end of the 1966 model year.
Folks in an adjacent neighborhood had a red, first-generation Chevrolet Camaro and despite that car being a base, six-cylinder model as well, I found it far more alluring. Granted, had I been of age when the Mustang was first introduced, I might feel differently. However, I felt as though General Motors answer to Ford's Mustang was not unlike a remake of a classic film being vastly superior to the original. And having seen the remake first there was no way I could not point out the flaws in the original.
I remember a frigid cold morning or two shoe-horned into the back of the "hillbillies" Mustang. As many as four of us neighborhood kids of various sizes and age would be back there. The daughter of the cantankerous woman my mother claimed, "was a boozer", rode alone in the passenger front bucket. Rank has its privileges. Given the constant feuding between our families it's fairly amazing I was ever invited to carpool with them.
Cigarette dangling from her mouth, hair up in curlers, slippers on her feet and decked out in her finest housedress, some call those things "moo-moo's", she cursed worse than most men as she yanked on that gigantic steering wheel trying to turn the darn thing that had no power steering. Complaining about having to drive us kids to school too. All in, a perfectly wonderful way to start the day.
I opted to walk most days when that Mustang was the only vehicular means to and from school. Thanks, but no thanks. Funny how mornings when my mother thought I was going to school with the hillbillies she never thought twice about days that I didn't. Ah, to be seven or eight years old in the early 1970's again.
I swear my ambivalence towards these cars has nothing to do with being bunched in the back of one like cattle. I can love you to death and hate your car; and vice-versa. Again, I simply don't care for the design. Same for most Ford's of the era save for perhaps Thunderbirds.
I don't know what ever happened to that Mustang. I take it they sold it and moved onto something else. I found far more interesting cars over there from time to time than that Mustang. They moved to Florida in the winter of 1976 and my mother was delighted. No doubt at the time there was some ridiculous dust-up going on over who knows what. Had to be more to it than just a gaggle of old cars on their lawn.
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