Mustangs

If you have read this blog for awhile, you know how frustrated I get when I hear music from my youth being used to sell me something today. Often it feels like a twentysomething marketing manager assumes that using something retro automatically endears me to a product. It doesn’t.

By contrast, a product designed in some retro manner sometimes does get my attention in a positive way.

Like many guys, I am a car nut. Not a gear head – there is a difference. I am into styling cues more than engine performance. And apparently I have always been a car nut. I was reminded of this at an odd moment. After my mother’s funeral last October, I was talking with two sisters, childhood neighbors I hadn’t seen since before high school. One of them asked me what I was driving. I pointed to my wife’s minivan and asked her why she wanted to know. Her answer – when we used to play together in your back yard, you were always talking about cars. As we laughed about that, I realized I can still identify nearly every make and model of American car made from the mid 50s to the mid 60s.

I say all that to say I love the new, obviously retro Mustang.



Mustang has been and still is my favorite car, although I have only owned one. During the 1970s I bought a very used 1966 model. The only option was the 289 V-8 engine, second biggest of that year’s model, and an AM radio. Front seat belts were standard by then, but rear belts were optional and my Mustang did not have them. The transmission was the basic 3-speed floor shift; there was no air conditioner, no power steering, and no power brakes.

My ’66 was the fastest car I’ve ever owned, and got better gas mileage than most cars I have owned. I would still be driving it if it hadn’t been stolen and dismantled for parts.

My favorite Mustangs are actually the 1967s-1969s. My high school girlfriend had a ’67 and kept it long past college and well into her career. She and her husband bought and restored several more Mustangs from that era. A guy I worked with in the 80s had a new one and a restored ’65 convertible. My wife and I rented a ’96 Mustang during a trip to Hawaii that year.

As I write this, I am wearing a Mustang shirt my sister gave me last Christmas.

Back to the present: what I like is that the 2005 and 2006 Mustangs have the look and feel of the ‘stangs of my youth, but also the luxury and safety features I like in middle age. A Mustang would not be very practical for me now, but I’d like to have one anyway. It would be a way to visit my youth without actually living there.



And Mustangs are still cool, to boomers and to some younger people who weren’t even born in the ‘60s. Maybe that is because the Mustang, according to Ford officials, has played a starring role in more than 500 films. John Wayne was only in 140 movies.

So I will continue to whine when I hear songs from the 1960s and 1970s in commercials. And I’ll drool when I see a Mustang.

I am so glad I didn’t like AMC Gremlins.