"Another Loss, Coming Soon"

ANOTHER LOSS, COMING SOON

The changes keep coming in 2012, whether I’m ready for them or not.

Most recently, my daughter left for her freshman year of college. This week, my son began his last year of high school. In the next two weeks, my mother will give away her English setter—my father’s hunting dog until Dad died—before she moves off the homestead and into town. By sometime in September, I will be the only permanent, full-time resident of the homestead land that is still owned by the Fairs.

And soon—perhaps by year’s end—another piece of the family will also disappear: my father’s Model A Ford, which has been here on the homestead for 46 years. Mom believes that she needs to (a) divest herself of things that she won’t use herself, and (b) sell off property and items that can bring her money to pay for her new home. The Model A will, I believe, bring her perhaps $15,000-$20,000—not much in the grand scheme of things—but it’s her choice. I certainly do not have the money to buy it from her and preserve it in the family, and my brother and sister have no apparent interest in it.

So I’ll do the next best thing now: I will preserve it in words and pictures.

This, then, is the history of my father’s Model A, according to my memory and the few notes about it that I have jotted down over the years:

The Model A Ford, which superseded the popular Model T, was manufactured in various permutations by the Ford Motor Company from 1927 through 1931. Dad’s Model A was built in 1931. My father bought it in the early 1950s—the oldest photo I have of it is from 1953—mainly to give him a mode of reliable transportation between his boyhood home in the very small, very rural environs of Walton, Indiana, and his college life at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. I seem to remember Dad telling me that he paid only a few hundred dollars for it at the time. (Somewhere in the many notes Dad left behind may be more precise information; if so, I’ll correct this detail later.)

In fact, Dad bought two Model A Fords at once that day. The body of the sedan he kept was painted a flat pink, with a black roof, running board and fenders; on the back window, still today, is a Purdue Boilermakers sticker. The body of the roadster he gave to his younger brother, Steve, was a flat light-grey. I remember Dad telling me that Steve basically ruined his car by trying to alter its body and then running it into the ground.

After Dad got married, completed college and dental school, and before he joined the Army and headed to Alaska, he put the Model A in storage somewhere in Indiana, and it stayed there until 1966, when Dad decided that he wanted to bring his old car home to the homestead.

Enter Wayne Finley, another transplanted Hoosier living with his family on the central Kenai Peninsula. Finley, a commercial fisherman among other entrepreneurial endeavors, would occasionally gas up his cargo-hauling box truck and drive all the way out to the Midwest to pick up a load of something he thought he could haul north and sell at a profit. Dad paid Finley to load the Model A into the cargo hold with whatever else he was hauling. On this trip, it turns out, he was hauling butter.

Yes, butter.

Cases and cases of butter were stacked around the Model A and hauled from Indiana to Alaska. (Oh, how I wish I had a photo of the Model A surrounded by all that butter! Instead, I’ve got only a photo of my dad’s mother standing near the partly open side door of the cargo hold; clearly visible inside is the Model A, along with two blue suitcases and a small cardboard box. On my grandmother’s face is a sort of Mona Lisa smile.)

When the Model A arrived on the homestead, we were still living in a trailer. Dad drove his precious vehicle out onto the open dirt area that is now the center of Mom’s lawn, and he parked it there so that he could photograph Mom and me and my sister, Janeice, posing along its left flank. Janeice and I stood on the running board, while Mom stood on the ground. The photo he took that day is one of only a handful of images of the old car in the condition in which Dad bought it.

Dad occasionally drove the Model A to work, which allowed Mom to have a car at home (instead of only our 1948 Ford tractor). And at least once, he let me ride with him so he could drop me off at Soldotna Elementary School. I remember distinctly once riding along then-gravel Binkley Street and having my door fly unexpectedly open. Fortunately, I didn’t fall out.

I think my father was pleased to have his old college car back, but I know that he regretted what he did only a few years later.

After Uncle Steve moved to the peninsula in the early 1970s, Dad began contemplating refurbishing the Model A, perhaps transforming it into a Re-Model A. And Steve, who loved to work on cars, convinced Dad that he should order all the parts, and together they could perform the makeover. So in the old meathouse, they disassembled the Model A, and as new parts (including new seats and other interior fixtures) arrived, they were left in boxes and stacked in and around the vehicle. But for some reason the big rebuild project never really got started.

For at least 20 years, the Model A sat in pieces—its big black-painted chassis and pink-painted body packed with boxes and spare parts, its engine covered with old rags to ward off the dust—as life went on all around it. All three of us kids (Lowell was born in 1968) grew up and moved away. At least half a dozen bird dogs hunted with Dad and passed on into Doggie Heaven. I got married. Dad got prostate cancer and battled it for the rest of his life. On and on, as the Model A waited in the dark and the cold … until at last Dad had had enough.

Our old family mechanic, Paul Reger, volunteered (not for free) to take on the rebuilding task, and Dad finally agreed. The chassis, the body and engine, and all the spare parts (old and new) were hauled over to Reger’s garage, and over the course of about a year a “brand-new” Model A took shape—a process completed when Paul took the finished vehicle to a detailer friend of his who gave the old car a shiny new coat of paint.

The old pink beast was gone. In its place was a sleek machine of forest green, with cream-colored hubs and spokes, and black fenders, roof and running board. Dad was justifiably proud of his new car. He drove it or allowed it to be driven a few times in Kenai’s Fourth of July parade and Soldotna’s Progress Days parade. He and Mom occasionally took it out for a brief spin on a sunny summer day, after which he washed and wiped away all of the dust.

But mostly he babied the Model A, parking it again in the meathouse and later in his new shop, and protecting it with a specially fitted grey cover to prevent scratching or scraping of any kind. He uncovered it periodically to check the charge on the battery or change the oil or fiddle with the levers and buttons. And then he covered it right back up. He fretted over it, although he rarely ever looked at it.

By the time Dad died in 2007, he had owned the Model A for more than half a century. The car itself is now 81 years old.

And soon, most likely, it will be gone, leaving not just an empty space in the shop but an empty place in the heart of this family.