1958. 1959. 1960
Hagerty Weekly (automobile) News, yesterday forwarded to me by a friend, has a sixtieth anniversary piece listing factors that caused the failure of Ford Motor Company’s Edsel car, introduced September 1957 and lasted only three model years, 1958, 1959, and 1960.
Here before, I’ve remembered Edsel, both Edsel Ford himself, the brilliant only son whom Henry Ford destroyed even directly causing his death;
and also the Edsel automobile that Ford Motor Company conceived in his name, produced, and marketed some fifteen years after Edsel’s death under Ford’s leadership of Henry Ford II.
The Edsel’s autumn 1957 showroom introduction I remember well.
Linda and I were driving in our green 1948 Dodge sedan from Newport, Rhode Island, where I was an OCSN in the Navy Officer Candidate School, up to Providence to meet and have dinner with elderly relatives, a Weller couple,
he descended, perhaps a son I don’t recall, of my grandfather AD Weller’s brother Reginald Heber Weller,
who early in the 20th century was bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin.
Uncle Heber had been the brother my grandfather visited one year in his middle to late teens, when he fell in love with a local lass, and told me of the wintry day he’d taken her out for a ride one snowy afternoon, stopped the sleigh, and kissed her. His first time kissing a girl, he told me. I’d love to have Pop back for more stories, and I have more questions for Pop now than I did then.
Anyway, making our way from Newport to Providence that Saturday, we drove by a car dealership where the new 1958 Edsel introduction was underway, and I insisted we stop, go in and look. The brochure we picked up that day may still be in my old car trunk that houses my collection of automobile literature.
Edsel Ford’s name as an automobile executive I remember from my childhood, and my grandfather telling me about him, and perhaps having seen news coverage when Edsel died in 1943 at age 49.
And of course I recall the fanfare at the death of his father Henry Ford on 7 April 1947, the story of his final illness, the bitter spring cold, the rising river that caused problems at Fairlane, the Ford estate and mansion, Ford’s ride around the estate the day before in a 1942 Ford fordor sedan (which was pictured in news accounts), electrical failure at Fairlane, attempts to heat the house and make him comfortable by lighting fireplaces, and his death that dark, cold night.
So death: even the most brilliant, driven, and wealthiest of us dies, we cannot engineer, argue, or bribe our way out of it.
Although and however, years ago, in a futuristic fantasy on Twilight Zone an elderly couple, holding hands and gazing into each other’s eyes, and still very much in love after a lifetime together, or maybe they had been high school sweethearts who were separated early in life and just now getting back together, that would have rendered the romance suitably tragic, stood side by side admiring a store’s window display of replacement bodies that could be purchased and one’s Being transferred into. They selected their own two, a beautiful young woman and a handsome young man. But like the oysters at Gene’s Oyster Bar in Millville, cash only, no credit, no financing; and the elderly couple had only enough savings for one.
It’s still impossible of course, but doesn’t really sound all that fanciful. Surely in some future age, civilization, or distant galaxy Bubba could be seventeen forever.
Who makes it there, remember me. I’ll be speeding across the heavens in a red Edsel convertible with the top down.
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/edsel-arrives-in-showrooms-at-last
Outtahere
DThos+
1958, 1959, and 1960 Edsel cars pictured.
