My Experiences With
Model A Fords

No More Model A's

After I left home, dad didn't spend so much time on the Model A's. Whenever I was home, we'd get both 2-door sedans out of the storage garage where the Missoula Mercantile let us keep them for $5/month apiece (many antique cars were stored down there). We'd run them a little bit and put them back. Dad would occasionally drive the good one in a parade or some other event. But mostly they just sat. Of course, Ruth kept the coupe in use.

In about 1974, dad suffered kidney failure and had to begin undergoing dialysis treatments. He continued to work for a few months, but found he couldn't handle the occasional travel that the job required and took an early retirement. He was able to keep the cars up for awhile longer, but he eventually developed severe neuropathy. He lost all feeling in his hands and feet, and had trouble doing very simple things like just buttoning up his shirt. Working on cars was out of the question.

The front car here is "Number 3," the other running 2-door sedan we had. A friend of ours wanted a Model A to restore. I put this car together to make a complete car for him to start with, and sold it to him for $200. Since Dad was letting me pocket the $200, he didn't help me much with it.

One day, a fellow in Kalispell offered to buy the best car for $3500. I thought it was worth more than that and thought he should cast around a bit for buyers, but dad decided to go ahead and sell it. A short time later, the same fellow offered another $3500 for the other two running cars and all of our various parts (which were considerable - easily enough to build at least one more running car), and dad agreed to that as well. It was quite a job just gathering up all the parts in the yard, the basement, the garage and the attic.

I'm sure it was hard for dad to see his cars go, but he really didn't have a choice since he was no longer able to maintain them (and Model A's need lots of maintenance - you wouldn't believe how often you have to change the points - every car we bought that was complete enough to have a seat always had several sets of spare points under the seat).

I was awfully sorry to see the cars go, too, but I wasn't interested in keeping one for myself. I didn't have anyplace to keep one or to work on it, and without dad around I didn't feel competent enough to keep one going by myself. I didn't have many tools, either. Sometimes in high school I used to really resent how much time dad expected me to put in working on the beasts. But looking back, I'm really glad we did this. All those hours represented a lot of "quality time" spent with my dad, and we did have a lot of fun - especially scrounging parts. I'm not what you could call a mechanical whiz, but all those hours working on Model A's did teach me a lot about using tools and about cars. True, most of that knowledge is useless on today's cars, but I sure know the fundamentals.