(This will be long, and in this family, it has to be. Photos are not our vehicles, but similar ones.)
Cars seemed to be in our family DNA, inherited from Dad and his brother, Larry. The public beginnings of this, mostly fun, obsession was racing at Miller Central Speedway in the early 1960s. However, the incubationary period began when Dad and Larry were quite young.
The first family car I can clearly remember was a used 1959 Ford Custom. It was a 4 door, brown and white. In those days nearly all cars were two colors, known as tu-tone . It had a six cylinder engine, and Dad bought it used. It was reasonable family transportation.
| 1959 Ford |
After some years of use as a family car, it was passed down to us children to drive to high school. We didn’t complain. That’s how it worked for nearly every family we knew. The kids got the old family car, while the parents got the new one. I don’t recall what ever happened to it. I suppose Dad sold or traded it.
Our family cars were always purchased used, because Dad felt that made good economic sense. They tended to be fairly standard transportation, in large part because that is what we could afford. In my recollection, Dad could not resist “tweaking” every car we owned. That meant that he performed a little surgery on the engine. He changed the carbeuretor from a 2-barrel to a 4. He changed the intake or exhaust manifold, something. Those changes made the engine run more efficiently, and, not coincidentally, made the car go faster.
Dad bought another used 1959 Ford from our custom combiners. It was red and white, with a V8 engine. We liked it better because it looked cooler and went faster. (Combiners had big trucks, pickups and combines and traveled across wheat country, the Plains, from south to north in harvesting season. That saved farmers from buying big, expensive machinery themselves, and helped the combiners pay for their combines.) This group had worked for us before and knew about Dad’s love for cars, especially Fords, so they brought this car along knowing Dad would be sorely tempted. They were right, Dad bought it.
I think it is the car Jim got a speeding ticket in. Kay and I were with him coming home from a school activity after dark on highway 45, north of Miller. Jim said something like, “Let’s see how fast this thing can go.” I was in the back, as the youngest always is, and I could see the speedometer. It was very exciting to me. Jim was 16, Kay was 18, and I was 14.
The speedometer crept up to 100 mph! Wow! I had never gone that fast before, and it felt like flying to me. Jim finally let up on the gas, and suddenly there were flashing lights behind us. Oh! That was exciting too, a new experience, and a little scary. The officer took Jim back to his patrol car. There were no insurance requirements then. Children could get a permit to drive between 6:00am and 6:00pm when they were 14, and a regular license when they were 16.
Jim came back to the car seeming quite calm. “78 good miles per hour,” he said. I was kind of disappointed that he didn’t get it for 100mph. I wanted him to get in more trouble. Well, I was his little sister! I knew that neither Kay nor I would tell how fast he was actually going.
The red and white ‘59 had a draw back. When making left turns, the right rear door swung open. Wide open! I remember a particular incident when I was sitting by that door. It was a warm spring afternoon after school. Jim was driving and Kay was front passenger. At the four-way stop, (The only one in town), Jim swung around to the left. I forgot to hold the door, so it swung wide open. There was a lot of traffic - for Miller - in the 1960s - and I felt so embarrassed. There I was, trying to hold on to the seat in front of me while I reached for the door to pull it closed. I felt like the whole world was staring at me. I’m sure at least 5 or 6 people were.
The new family car was a 1963 1/2 Ford Galaxie 500. It was a 4 door, aqua and white, with one of the first 289 cubic inch V8 engines to come out. Mom insisted on 4 doors, which was probably a good idea with all us children. It was a pretty car, and really classy, we thought.
| 1963 1/2 Ford Galaxie 500 Except ours wasn't a convertible, unfortunately! |
I wrecked that car once. I was driving it home from softball practice and hit a cow. In my defense, it was after dark and it was Oligmueller’s black angus cattle that I hit. A bunch of them ran out to cross the road as I came past. I thought I was lucky to only hit one. I was also shaken. I had never had any type of accident before. The front end was smashed up, but it was repairable. Cars in that time were made of significantly heavier steel and withstood heavier impacts with less damage.
Next came a 1964 Ford. It was white 4 door with a blue interior. It probably had a 289, but I’m not sure. It was not all that remarkable, except for the time Mom damaged it, and later I did.
| 1964 Ford Galaxie 500 |
I don’t think Mom ever really liked that car. She especially didn’t like that it was white because she felt it would not show up in the winter against the snow. Turns out, Mom was right about that. One winter day she was returning home when the township road grader was plowing snow off the road. Mom said the snow was flying in the wind and she didn’t think the driver even saw her. He didn’t pull over, and she had to run into the neighbor’s mailbox to avoid being hit by the snowplow. It smashed through the windshield and scared Mom quite a bit, though she wasn’t hurt.
My accident was entirely my fault and entirely preventable, though I denied it at the time. I was about 16 years old and had driven Terry, Tammy and myself to a 4-H meeting. Coming home I deliberately went past our turn off from the 10 Mile Road. I had been thinking about backing up techniques. Every driver I’d watched put their right hand on the back of the bench seat, turned the body and head so they could look through the rear window, and backed up. I thought one ought to be able to back up simply by watching in the rear view mirror at the windshield. I also thought it would be fun to back up fast. Of course I knew that I was wiser than conventional wisdom and best practices. (As you see in other entries, I always had to try out my hare-brained theories, with many disastrous results.)
So I past the turn off and stopped the 1964 Ford. I moved the shift lever, attached to the steering column, to R. I glued my eyes to the rear view mirror. With a self-satisfied grin on my face, I began to ease backwards. Looked good so far, so I sped up. Terry and Tammy were watching the back. Suddenly, looking terror-stricken, Terry turned around and shouted, “You’re going off the road!”
Terry was exactly right. I began to descend into the ditch just as I came to the approach. The car was launched over the approach and landed on the other side, the tail end taking the brunt of the landing. We were still on all four wheels, no one was hurt. No one’s eyes were wider than mine. I knew in an instant I was in such big trouble with Dad. He loved his cars and treated them with great TLC. An accident was bad enough, but deliberately wrecking a car was heresy!
Of course, my first response was figuring out how to minimize the damage to myself that hovered like impending doom. I threatened Terry and Tammy that they better never tell anything.
When I got home, I lied my brains out. There had been a deer that I had dodged and gone into the ditch. That only held up until the next morning, when Dad got a chance to look the car over. Clearly I had fibbed. Then that little rat, Terry, told on me. Dad didn’t speak to me or make eye contact for three days because I had hurt one of his cars. I felt too low to exist. (The car was repaired of fairly minor damage, and returned to service.)
There was a 1966 dark blue Mercury 4 door. I don’t remember the model, but it was huge! It was long, it was wide. It was the epitome of those big cars of the 60s when gas was cheap, big was better, and even bigger was even better. The engine was a 410 cubic inch monster V8. It would go really fast, but it took miles to get up to speed. The compression ratio of the engine was very low, the pistons were dished, so there was less pressure. It was geared very high. All that meant that it couldn’t beat little Datsun in a drag race. (Datsun is now known as Nissan.)
| 1966 Mercury Montclair, looks exactly like our "Radison." |
I had that car for part of my college career. I frequently used it to drive myself and friends to parties at nearby colleges. We called it The Radison because it could easily and comfortably sleep two or three in the front, back, and on floor.
Jim scratched one side of the Mercury all up by driving it through a fence. He was driving to Huron in the rain. He stepped on the accelerator to pull out and pass another car. The automatic transmission shifted down and the car quickly swapped ends on the wet highway. He slid into the ditch and through a fence. The fence scratched up the side of the car. I was pleased at that. I was about time that he got in more trouble with cars. (I was a rotten sister about such things as that.)
The 1972 LTD was a family car/muscle car cross. It had a 400 cubic inch V8, and was better geared and much more powerful than the Mercury. Dad put a 4 barrel carbeurator on it, plus a bigger intake manifold, and some other tweaks I don’t recall. It really ran well, even though it was quite heavy.
| 1972 Ford LTD |
I got the idea, along with my boyfriend Brian, of using the LTD for the new class of racing at the local tracks, called Enduros. The class was street cars that were extremely limited in terms of modifications, so it was very cheap racing. The year was around 1985.
Brian and I took out the glass, except the windshield, and the back seat. We made a few changes for safety’s sake, including adding a roll bar and two seat belts, one on each side, to cross in front of the driver. I think Dad reinforced the wheels too. Brian and I took turns driving the car on Sunday’s at the State Fair Speedway in Huron. We must have raced about half a dozen times.
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| The 1972 LTD as a race car. This is how it looked after the last race of the season. |
We did all right. The last time it raced, I drove a race in Miller. It was a 200 laps or 2 hours race, whichever came first. It was tiring, really exciting, and I’m so glad for the experience. I finished 8th out of the 40+ cars entered. I learned how to slide around turns, which was really exciting. I passed a lot of cars. I’ve got a photo of the check I received from the track for my finish - $35!
There were other cars that showed up here and there on the farm. I’m not entirely sure who some of them belonged to - Ross Bingham, Dad’s brother Larry, etc.
There was a little Jeep that I only vaguely remember. I think it was US Army surplus from WW II. I remember riding in it with Gramma Heinzerling to take the junk out to the dump in the pasture.
Grampa once had a black International pickup. Dad called it a Binder, an early nick-name for Internationals. In those days brakes were also called “binders”, though I’m not certain why. I think the pickup was from the 40s, post World War II. I remember there was no horn button, but there was an insulated electrical wire that came up the steering column near the wheel. The wire ended in a round, metal disk. To honk the horn, the driver held the wire, and tapped the disk against the metal steering column! Yeah, really. That completed an circuit which activated the horn. Can you imagine how awkward that was? It was a little crazy, but an accurate example of how people "made do" with what they had, plus a little wire and tape.
| 1948 International half ton pickup |
There was a navy blue ‘51 Ford 4 door sedan. Jim wanted to put the race car numbers on it, so he got the stencils of the numbers and put them on each side of the car the same way. So on one side, the number was “82“, just like the race car. On the other side it was “28“. Jim got a lot of teasing for that.
Grampa had a black and white ‘57 Fairlane, but I remember very little of that. Dad’s sister Nancy had a late 50s Studebaker Chief. Uncle Larry eventually got it, and he blew the engine up by driving it too hard. (See below.)
Grampa had a ‘62 Fairlane, a little car. When he was on the West Coast I used it to drive to school. Larry blew it up.
I once had a ‘58 Ford when I was in college. Larry blew it up.
Jim had a ‘63 Pontiac Bonneville. (Larry did not get his hands on it.)
Gramma Olive, Grampa’s second wife after Gramma died, had a big Mercury Marauder, about 1960. It was navy blue and it was a fastback. It was a good car, faasssssst. Larry - well, you know.
| Jim and Terry's Torino looked just like this. |
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| 1969 Fairlane in 1974 |
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| 1979 Mercury Bobcat |
Then there was Old Red, probably the most famous vehicle on the farm. (Each vehicle was referred to as it was - "truck" was a big farm truck that carried tons of cattle or grain. "Car" was a passenger car. "Pickup" was like a current Ford F-150. A van was a van. A tractor was a tractor, etc. “Vehicle” was the generic term for motorized transportation.)
Old Red was a 1969 Ford F-100 pickup. It was red, of course, with a 300 cubic inch, six cylinder engine. Two-wheel drive, it was a rather mundane workhorse. It was one of a very few vehicles Dad bought brand new. Old Red did lots of hauling, lots of towing, sat all day at the edge of every single field at some time, while one of us was disking, plowing, mowing, etc. Old Red did everything we needed done on the farm.
| 1968 F-100 |
Old Red didn’t really enter into the realm of Heinzerling Myth and Legend until Dad bought a new pickup, a 1979 F-150. It was a pretty shade of brown with cream accents, matching wheels and topper. It also had a 300 six cylinder, but it was 4-wheel drive, the first 4-wheel drive we owned, and it was Dad’s special baby.
| This is the right color for the '79. |
| Another view of the '79, though the color is wrong. |
I don’t think any one family member christened Old Red. Old Red looked small and ordinary next to the ‘79, but it had worked very well for us, and we were loyal. “Old Red” just drifted into our lexicon, and stayed there.
We all drove Old Red at different times. Even though Old Red was demoted to the back bench by the ‘79, no one much minded driving it. We did manage to wreck it a time or two. Well, specifically, Tammy wrecked it once. I think a boyfriend ran into her, and the front end was smashed up. A 1968 Ford F-100 is one tough critter, and Old Red rose again! There were some repairs, and then it was on the road for another decade or so.
Old Red’s odometer stopped working shortly after 100,000, but guesstimates put total mileage at over 200,000. At one time it was Terry’s pickup, and then mine. With Dad’s advice and supervision, I rebuilt a 390 engine to replace the old 300 six-banger. That engine was so worn out that there wasn’t enough compression to start it without priming it - pouring a 1/2 cup of gasoline directly into the carbeurator. That’s because the parts of the engine - pistons, valves, etc - were sloppily loose, rather than the tight fit that is required. Because it was so loose, it started easily in the cold. One morning when it was -30 degrees and Old Red had been sitting out all night, it still started. Remarkable.
Old Red never blew up, never stopped working. In 1988, after the heavily tweaked 390 was installed, I took it out on the freeway to see how fast it would go. I’d already learned that if I stomped on the gas when it was stopped, Old Red could really scream those rear tires! Well, I got up to 130 mph, and decided I didn’t want to go any faster, although Old Red did. 130 is pretty fast for a pickup whose steering mechanics had 200,000+ miles on them.
As we children moved off the farm to go to school, we continued to rely on Dad when we had car trouble. Dad was a highly skilled diagnostician. More than once I called him to say that I was having car trouble. Dad would ask what was happening, what the engine sounded like, and a few other details. From that bit of information, Dad was able to diagnose the problem and tell me how to get it taken care of. My siblings did the same. All of us, except Kay, who was never into cars, kept a variety of hand tools and knew how to carry out those repairs. We changed our own oil and tires, filled up fluids, checked oil and tire pressure, etc.
The Heinzerling auto legacy continues in the hands of Jim, Terry, and cousin Dillon. Dillon Heinzerling is Larry's son, though I don’t believe Dillon has blown up any cars. His son, Matt, is an excellent race driver.
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Some basic information about cars in our time:
>We paid less than a dollar for a gallon of gas. In fact, until about 1975, we didn’t even pay 50c per gallon! So gas mileage was not an issue, and there were very few small cars.
>Cars did not have air bags. Padding the center of steering wheels was an innovation in the early 1960s, which came about because in front end wrecks drivers were getting speared.
>Seat belts did not become common in cars until the early 60s. Sometime in the 60s the federal government mandated that auto companies installed seat belts on every car they manufactured.
>Seats were bench style. That means that the front seat looked just like the back seat; one level seat from left to right.
>The cars were so large that one could stretch out one’s legs in the back seat. The big sedans seated seven people with a decent degree of comfort, three in the front, four in the back.
>In 1966, a Fairlane 500 tu-door sold for $2000. Total. (Remember, unskilled labor was paid a couple of bucks per hour.)
>Air conditioning was a rare luxury that didn’t become common place until the 70s or 80s.
>Power locks or windows were very rare, and considered luxury options. Many did not want them because they were considered dangerous. They weren’t all that reliable, and people feared being trapped in their car.
>There were no computers, on-board or otherwise. Dad kept non-functional cars on the farm because he could take parts off them to use in another vehicle that had problems.
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