The ’65 Mustang was my Aunt Dee’s ride or die

This is a story of the Ford Mustang. Or, rather, two Ford Mustangs. One of them did not have a happy ending, and I was in it.

If you are hazy on your Ford Mustang history, I’ll catch you up to date a bit. The Mustang was conceived by a team at Ford led by Lee Iacocca, who later gained fame as the man who saved Chrysler.

The first Mustang was introduced to the public in April 1964, as the “1964-1/2” Mustang. It was an instant hit. The public fell in love with it because it had a unique, sporty body style compared to what U.S. autos had been, which were cars shaped like boxes and quite unattractive.

Purchasing a brand new Mustang off the showroom floor in 1964-65 would set you back $2,400, according to cars.com. Today, those antique vehicles bring from $16,000 for the coupe to $33,000 for the fastback model.

My dad was among the millions of Americans who were taken by the Mustang and eventually bought one when he was stationed on the island of Okinawa while in the military. I’ll come back to that.

Anyway, the Mustang was beloved by my dad and so many others because it had a long nose, short rear end and distinctive grill and tail lights. Eventually, it came in a 2-door coupe, convertible and the incredibly popular fast-back.

I’m writing about the Mustang because my 5 year-old grandson, Solomon, and I discovered a show on the Roku channel called “Counting Cars,” which follows a shop in Las Vegas that rehabs older vehicles and turns them into showpieces.

We streamed an episode this morning in which the shop refurbished a ’65 Mustang and turned it into a perfect candy apple-red rendition of how it must have looked on the showroom floor in 1965. Solomon could not get enough, running through the house to get his grandmother to come in and see the beautiful car.

So, two Mustang stories.

When I was a senior in high school, I lived with my aunt and uncle in Fort Smith, Ark. My aunt Dee drove a black ’65 Mustang and was so in love with the car that she told everyone she would never drive another.  Its compact size made it easy for her to maneuver on the road.

Fast forward to roughly 1980, when I was a young sports reporter at the Southwest Times Record, which had its offices and newsroom in downtown Fort Smith.

One day, as I stepped out of the building onto the sidewalk, my uncle, L.R. Mendenhall, drove up and parked Aunt Dee’s Mustang right outside the SWTR’s door along Rogers Ave.

At virtually the same moment, Leroy Fry, who was the newspaper’s managing editor, walked out of the building and spotted the Mustang. I introduced my Uncle “Blue Eyes” (as he was known to our family) to Leroy. The editor told him that he had to have that Mustang and how much would my uncle sell it to him for.

“It’s not for sale,” Blue Eyes told him. “It’s my wife’s car and she says it’s the only one she will ever drive.”

End of story.

That black Mustang was my Aunt Dee’s ride or die, and I’m pretty sure when she died in roughly 2000 that the car was still in her family’s possession.

My second Mustang story involved the 1967 Mustang my dad bought while on Okinawa. He was in the Army, so our whole family lived on the island. This was in 1968 when I was 15 years old.

Dad loved his Mustang, which was painted in a sort of burnt-orange color, and drove it every day to work. He was a hot GI in a hot vehicle.

I wanted to drive it, too, and begged him to let me get behind the wheel. So one weekend he asked the son of a family friend who was about 19 years old to drive me and the Mustang to an abandoned Japanese airstrip where I could drive it and stay out of harm’s way.

I remember driving back and forth on the airstrip multiple times and getting a feel for the car. Then we decided to head back to the military base where our families lived. I moved over to the passenger side, and the older kid (can’t think of his name now) took the wheel.

We drove off the airstrip and back onto the rural two-lane road that was adjacent to a field of sugar cane. My young driving instructor said, “let’s see what this car can do,” and gunned it.

I’m not sure how fast the car was traveling, but we roared down that rural road until my driver suddenly realized there was a 90-degree turn at the end and started screaming that we weren’t going to make it.

We didn’t.

The car flew off the end of the road at the hairpin curve, hit hard in the sugar cane field and landed on its side. Neither one of us had buckled our seatbelt (hey, this was the ’60s), but we were mostly uninjured. My friend cut his hand on the steering wheel when the padding came off.

We climbed out of the driver’s side, which was facing the sky and then tried to figure out how to contact our parents in this era before the cellphone was a gleam in anyone’s eye.

There was a military installation about a half mile away, so we walked to it, told the guards at the security gate what happened, and they let us call our parents. Of course, we told them exactly how it happened.

The car looked OK to me, but had to be towed to a shop somewhere on the island. Turns out the frame was bent and the insurance company declared it a total loss.

My dad was heartbroken, of course. But the fact that we were unhurt took some of the steam out.

He never owned another Mustang.