FTLComm - Tisdale - March 31, 1999
We often think of the cars of the sixties being big but big was not achieved until ten years later with the monsters of the seventies. The sixties were like the times they were made in, exuberant, flamboyant and fun. This would have been the ideal date car in the fall of 1962 when it appeared on the streets. A hard top with simple interior and a lot of hood out there in front of the windshield. The Gulf of Tonkin incident had just taken place and American "advisors" had set up camp at CamRan Bay and DaNang.
The sixty-three Ford was a smooth design with a great float to its ride. It came standard with an appallingly underpowered six cylinder engine that was much less then what the car needed. My father bought one, not a hard top, but a sedan in this colour and we merrilly towed it from Ford dealer to Ford dealer as warranteed work to the head was faulty and attempted twice, then a full new engine had to be installed. My fifty Plymouth moved it the forty miles to Carlyle and then the sixty miles from Carlyle to Moosomin. It may have been we just had a bad example of the car, but when it was running it was a pleasant machine. Father didn't like it and with good cause and it served him for less then a year. It was not unusual for cars to be traded with only a year of use in the sixties, model changes came every year and though the sixty-two and sixty-four versions of the this car were similar they were still quite distinctive and the auto makers put the effort into these machines that warranted a short
ownership. The Chevy of the same years was a much different style, a bit higher clearance and loads of chrome. The roof line of the hard tops were referred to at the time as a "formal" roofline, a styling trend that involved a near flat back window. Mercury carried this to the extreme with the back window actually sloping inward. There are two examples of these here in Tisdale and if I can, I will get you some pictures of the Canadian made Mercury Meteor. Though cars like this one look large they were not extremely heavy as you can see the trunk is a big place.
	Timothy W. Shire
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September 12, 2004 your description of the car in this series of pictures is incorrect! The car is a 1964! After having owned more than half a dozen 63's I should know. Dennis Parent