His Vintage Mustang Still Has His Wife’s Janet Jackson and Elton John Tapes

When it was my change, all-around 1982, I advised my father I wished a Mustang, but especially an previous one—not just one of the 1970s Mustangs that had been all around the put at that time. [Ford originally launched the Mustang for the public on April 17, 1964, at the New York World’s Fair.] When he introduced this yellow car dwelling, I was as excited as any 17-yr-previous child having his first car. I also favored the reality that the motor vehicle was born the exact same yr as I was: 1966.

I was the only child driving a 1966 Mustang to North Warren Regional Superior School. Ideal absent, I was shocked at the notice this car obtained, and how several strangers wanted to talk to me about it. Individuals honked and waved, and it was a multigenerational thing—young and old. The 1st query a whole lot of people today questioned was which engine my auto experienced in it, as there were being choices. Mine was a 200-cubic-inch six-cylinder engine, not the sexier 289-cubic-inch V-8.

I grew up in New Jersey, but we lived so close to the Pennsylvania border that our regional newspaper was the Easton Specific. We bought the community Pennsylvania news. Where I lived, you celebrated the heavyweight champion Larry Holmes, simply because he was from Easton. But we also lived near to Allentown, which was where Lee Iacocca was from.

Iacocca was considered the “Father of the Mustang.” My mothers and fathers frequently minimize newspaper articles out about him for me, and I have study all his textbooks. He went to Lehigh College, and even though I would not say I went to Lehigh because of him, he surely encouraged me. I finished up graduating from Lehigh. 

Forty decades after I received my driver’s license, I still have my Mustang, and it continue to has the Lehigh University parking sticker in the window. In substantial faculty wood store, I designed a console for the vehicle, and it is nevertheless there, with a location to put improve that has tokens from the 1980s for the Delaware Water Hole Toll Bridge. Immediately after I graduated college or university, I achieved my spouse, Karen, and some of her cassette tapes from these early days are continue to in the car—Elton John, Janet Jackson and other individuals. 

I had the car repainted a new coat of its first coloration, referred to as Springtime Yellow. And I have because added a next 1966 Mustang that experienced belonged to my father—who first instilled in me and my siblings a love of autos and of Ford in unique. 

Generate to A.J. Baime at [email protected]