© Berthoud Weekly Surveyor
July 31, 2014
EDITO R’S CHOIC E
One Mustang: three generations Story and photos by John Gardner • The Surveyor
Everyone’s got a “Mustang” story. This is mine. I can still feel the humidity in the air, running through my grandparent’s yard in Osceola, Missouri, as a kid, on the banks of the Osage River. My family traveled to Osceola every summer to visit my maternal grandparents, who lived in the same house that my mother, Brenda Gardner, grew up in. As far back as my memory serves, I remember the bright reddish-orange 1965 Mustang parked in the garage of that house. And, for a young boy, that car was pure excitement. To hear the engine come to life and growl as my grandfather, Coy Fleetwood, turned the key and revved the engine was like hearing a tiger growl after being interrupted mid meal. One of my fondest memories sitting in the passenger seat; my eyes barely able to see over the dashboard as I watched the road lead us through the dense tree cover lining the old country roads. The two-lane roads wound their way over hills and through the countryside like a rollercoaster. It felt as if we were going 100-miles-per hour, and for all I know, we were. I was elated. My grandfather loved driving that car and I loved riding in it with him. Afterword, he’d clean the car, and I’d play as if I was driving over the hills at speed; complete with sound effects. “Vroom, vroom,” I’d go. “Vroom, vroom.” I rode in that car dozens of times growing up all the way through high school. In 1990, when I was 15, my grandfather took that wild horse for a road trip across desolate Kansas and all the way to Loveland, to see our family. My grandmother must have followed in another car because the Mustang was here to stay, boarded in our garage; put out to pasture in Colorado after a valiant life in Missouri. He gave the car to my mother for her 40th birthday. A girl who had always wanted a pony for her birthday finally got one, sort of. And the gravity of this gift wasn’t lost on my mother. She loved that car too.
When my grandfather purchased this car in 1966, he did so as a car for my grandmother, Josephine. But this car was also the ride that my mother drove to and from high school. Yeah, she was that girl. My aunt and uncle, my mother’s younger siblings, also drove this car to and from high school when they were able to drive. So, it’s gotten used. But, after my uncle graduated from high school and there were no more kids to use the vehicle for commuting, my grandfather finally had his toy all to himself. And he took exceptional care of the car for the next 16 years, or so, until he gave it to my mother. Even the factory windshield washer fluid baggie remains intact as if the car rolled off the line yesterday. The car still has its original dashboard; no cracks or wear. No joke. Once in her possession, my mother treated it as her father had; it mostly sat idle in the garage, only to be driven on weekends when my parents went out to dinner or to Estes Park for the day. My father took over caring for the aging beauty; a responsibility that he welcomed considering that he’d given up his other beauty: a 1941 Ford, two-door sedan to allow room in the garage for the Mustang. That car, the Mustang, and the “General Lee”, the famous “Dukes of Hazzard” 1969 Dodge Charger, specifically in that order, are the sole reasons that I’m a car guy. I used to daydream about one day driving the Mustang, which had been forever off limits. “It’s not a toy,” my mother would say. And I understood as well. Admittedly, I wasn’t the safest driver when I first obtained my license, but that’s another story. In 2003, my father passed away. And, in a way, the Mustang did too. As he was no longer around to care for the aging beauty and my mother wasn’t much of an oil monkey, I drained the fuel, changed the oil, disconnected the battery and covered it with a tarp. And there that car sat for the next 10 years, wrapped in the sadness of missing my father. My mother had given the car to me at that point, and as happy as I was to have it, it never filled the void of missing my father. I was also in college at the time and