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The Model A Ford, which superseded the popular Model T, was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.
