Amazing what you find when you're not looking for it. Probably since the day I started this blog, I've been searching for a 1968 Ford Ranch Wagon in "Brittany Blue" just like the one I grew up with to write about. While this one which I found on Haggerty's auction site is not exactly like the car of my woe begotten wonder years, it's a bit fancier "Custom 500" than the bone-stripper my father's car was, all things being equal, she's close enough.
Let's swing open or pull down her "Magic Tailgate", kick the "poverty" hubcaps and take this memory machine for a figurative drive down memory lane.
First, some context as I attempt to see this car again through my then six-year-old, car-obsessed eyes.
Late summer of 1970, I was delighted to learn that the "block was cracked" on my father's 1961 Rambler Classic, four-door sedan. While I didn't know what that meant at the time, all I needed to know was that we were getting a "new", or "new-to-us", "new car".
Long story short, my father picked up a literal rental grade 1968 Ford Ranch Wagon from a Hertz' used car lot not far from Kennedy Airport to replace it.
Suffice to say I was disappointed and in more ways than one. Not only was I not thrilled with the dreary, featureless, utilitarian to a fault Ford wagon, but I was more upset my father bought it without consulting with me about it.
Yes, I was all of six-years-old but still. Then again, my father was clueless when it came to stereotypical, father son bonding. We never played catch in the yard let alone go car shopping together.
Knowing my father, he did what he found simplest and easiest for him. He was familiar with Hertz from renting from them so often when he'd return home from his monthly, sometimes more, business trips. He needed a car immediately, Hertz had something low-mileage in his price range they wanted to heave-ho and, enter my father stage-right. My father must have been like, "so what that it was a station wagon". I doubt he even consulted with my mother about it.
Back in the 1960's and 1970's, station wagons were a major part of Ford's portfolio of vehicles. For 1968, not only did they sell seven different iterations of these full-sizers, but they also sold intermediate- and compact-wagons.
The piece de resistance on this car, though, are these fold-down, "facing" rear jump seats; the stuff of prepubescent kid dreams back in the day. These non-removable seats increased passenger capacity up to, well, in theory anyway, ten people. For comparison's sake, the current Chevrolet Suburban has seating for up to nine.
Fold the seats and rear seat down and you've got hauling capacity to rival a pickup truck. In my father's car, there were metal panels that opened and closed north-south giving access to a spacious trunk of sorts; in my father's car, a trunk loaded with sandbags to help give it at least some modicum of traction in winter.
Owing to the ala carte nature of the way these cars could be optioned, this car is a bit an oddity. For instance, it has a column mounted three-speed, the proverbial three-on-the-tree that even by 1968 was increasingly rare; my dad's car had an automatic. Also, appears this car also lacks power-steering that my father's car had as well.
Then again, my father's car had been a rental, Hertz no doubt wanted a car as accessible to the masses as possible.
Like my father's car, this one has the new-for-1968, 302-cubic-inch Windsor V-8; I don't see a power steering pump. Smooth and torquey, my father, who was not a car guy, loved its power and, sign-of-the-times, thought the 17-miles-per-gallon highway it got the pinnacle of thriftiness.
Adding to my verklempt was that the family across the street from us had a 1968 Ford Country Squire loaded with every accouterment on the options list. You name it, it had it. Including pie-in-the-sky air conditioning, a hedonistic option given that my parents didn't own even a single window air conditioner. We roughed it with these side-vent windows that opened via a separate crank from the regular door window cranks.
Bidding on this, last I checked was at $2,800. Despite its indirect history with me, I have little interest in it. Blame the three-on-three-tree, lack of power steering and these shot-to-pieces front seat covers that, I have to imagine, are impossible to find anything close to OEM for. My father's car's front seats were split like this as well. Note the lack of head rests; who's up for some whiplash?
I do love its patina which I hope whoever buys it keeps.
Nope, I'll pass on this one and simply bask in the very mixed, bittersweet memories I have of my father's Ranch Wagon.
My mother put her foot down and demanded my father get rid of the Ranch Wagon during her two-years-long, "I want a Cadillac" ethos, tirade or tantrum that began in the summer of 1977.
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