The Edsel

My father was not given to a lot of nonsense. He was born in 1921 and by the time he was a teen, the country was in the midst of the Great Depression. He had to quit school in the ninth grade and start work to help provide for his family. Then came WWII and he served in Europe. To say the least, his early life left little time for frivolousness. While he was all about working and saving, occasionally he would do something spontaneous. I remember one time when I was working at his shop, he had been up the Sylacauga to pick up some parts around mid morning and he came back with a sack of hot dogs, enough to feed everybody at the shop. Might not sound like much to you but for him, it was noteworthy. Life was about working hard and making a living. I remember us going up to the shop once on Labor Day and working. I think it was because we were swamped with work and he was just trying to catch up, but when I complained about having to work on Labor Day, he said that is what you are supposed to do on Labor Day, labor! He was equally serious about not wasting. He remembered what it meant to have to "use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without."

I tell you all that so you can fully appreciate the story of "The Edsel." It was the summer of 1960. I was out of school and working at the shop for the summer. In addition to repairing cars, my father would buy, sell or trade vehicles. Somehow, he go hold of an 1958 Edsel. He may have took it in trade for something he had, probably with some boot, but somehow he ended up with it. I don't remember a lot of the details about it but I think it was a hardtop and it must have been a northern car because it had some serious rust issues. I do recall that it had a big V-8 motor and an automatic transmission. I think that it had also been in an accident and one of the front fenders may have been messed up. There was not much demand for Edsels back then, especially ones that had that many problems. Anyway, someone came up with the idea of taking the "smoke wrench" and turning the Edsel into a cutdown. Normally I would have expected my dad to say to not be wasting oxygen and acetylene but for reasons unknown, he said it was OK. I remember that Wally Burks and myself took the cutting torch and managed to remove the top, the front fenders, the doors and a few other items from the Edsel and sure enough we had ourselves a cutdown. I don't know what ever happened to it. I suppose it eventually was sold for scrap but I think that for awhile we used it to push start vehicles that could not be started by other means. I do recall that on at least one occasion we drove it the 16 plus miles from the shop to our house. With all that heavy sheet metal removed, the old V-8 Edsel would fly. I can remember it as if it was yesterday, driving down through Hanover (I was 14 but had been driving since I was 11), no top, no doors in the warm summer early evening air with the radio blaring The Happy Organ by Dave 'Baby' Cortez

I look back on it now and still find it strange that my father would go along with anything so patently frivolous. As I was writing this, it dawned on me that I was about the same age when all this happened as my father had been when he had to drop out of school and go to work. Maybe that had something to do with it. Maybe he was experiencing something with me that he could not experience himself at that age. I don't know, I just remember that it was great when it happened and it is still great 50 plus years later.