My Experiences With
Model A Fords

Our First Model A

It was the summer of 1963. I was 14, and living in the sleepy little town of Missoula, Montana (well, it was a sleepy little town back then). Dad and I often went fishing at Flathead Lake, about 80 miles northwest of Missoula. On the way, we passed through the town of Arlee.

Arlee is a little town on a reservation. Dad lived a mile outside of Arlee on the Jocko river for a time during the '30s. His parents owned and ran a small motel and store there. In 1963, an old friend of his, Harold King, was living there on the Jocko river and running the motel. We often stopped and visited, and sometimes did a little fishing on the Jocko (whites were allowed to fish the Jocko back then).

One day, we were visiting with Harold. Somehow the subject of antique cars came up. As far as I know, Dad had never been particularly interested in these, but he said in passing that he thought it would be fun to restore a Model A Ford. I didn't think much of it at the time. I don't think Dad did either. He was just making conversation.

The next time we stopped at Harold's, there was a Model A 2-door sedan sitting there beside his mobile home. I remember Dad saying "uh-oh", or perhaps something a little stronger. Sure enough, Harold had taken Dad at his word and found us a Model A. I don't know what all was going through Dad's head at this time, but he went ahead and reimbursed Harold the $25 he had paid for it (this should give you an idea of the condition this pile of rust was in).

Our first problem was how to get the thing back to Missoula. It certainly wasn't going under it's own power. We had some rope, or maybe even a towing chain, so we decided we'd just pull it home behind our '55 Pontiac. I didn't have a driver's license yet, but I'd done quite a bit of driving. Dad often turned me loose on some of the Montana back roads. He especially got a perverse enjoyment driving to the top of some mountain outside Arlee and having me drive back down. I'd be scared to death of meeting another car on one of those narrow dirt roads, but fortunately we rarely did. So I was pretty comfortable driving the back roads, but I was not used to driving on a busy highway like U.S. 93 - especially being towed in a broken down Model A Ford.

This Model A really looked like a pile of junk to me, but if I had foreseen some of the junksters we'd be picking up later on I'd realize that this thing was really in pretty decent shape. It was a fairly complete car. Only two of the tires were flat. The steering worked. After a little bit of work, the mechanical brakes worked a little. There weren't any floorboards, but there were places I could put my feet to avoid having to drag them on the road - just made it a little awkward to use the brake pedal. There were seats - well, some bare springs, anyway. There was a windshield (but no other glass). The vinyl roof had disappeared long ago.

We got the two flats fixed and the brakes working a little, and off we went. Maybe you can imagine what this trip was like for me. Dad would try to keep the speed down, but of course this was highway 93 ("Pray for me, I drive highway 93") with lots of traffic. Of course, there was no battery in the thing, so no taillights or brake lights or anything. Whenever Dad would slow down a bit, I'd do my best to brake but would usually bump into the Pontiac because those brakes weren't doing very much. But we finally made it home, safe and sound.