My First Flathead

by Jay Hinshaw

This is the story of my first flathead, the big snowstorm of 1967, and how that snow led to my acquisition, under nefarious circumstances, of a 1950 Ford.

The 23 inch snowstorm of 1967 is, still to this day, the largest snow event in Chicago’s weather history. The city was at a stand-still for days. You may recall seeing historic news photos of Lake Shore Drive as a parking lot full of abandoned cars and busses. A few weeks after the storm the city was still clearing snow, and news reports talked about the difficulty the city was having with towing the hundreds of abandoned cars that still remained where they had stalled. Cars were cheap then, the scrap price of a beater was only $35, and many owners had simply never returned to retrieve cars of little value.

At this time I was a 19 year old kid living at home on the south side of Chicago, a full-time student at the local community college, broke, working Saturdays for gas money. Across the street from the pizza joint where my friends hung out, I noticed what I thought to be one of those abandoned cars in a White Castle parking lot. I checked it out: still half buried in snow was a shoebox Ford, older repaint, rusty rocker panels, and a totally gutted interior with only a wood crate on the floor for a driver to sit on. License plates had been removed, doors unlocked, nothing left behind. An abandoned car for sure, or so I thought at the time.

But this was not just any shoebox Ford. This was a coupe, fairly rare even then. My teenage friends and I were into the usual sixties muscle cars and 57 Chevys, but unlike my friends, I also liked the early Fords, especially the cool-looking coupes. And here was one of those coupes, soon to be towed and probably wind up in a junkyard. What a shame. Some fool had abandoned a coupe. A coupe!

I mentioned my find to my brother-in-law who agreed that it would be a shame, and said he could help me get that car. Bob was in his late twenties, a gear-head with a shady past. He told me he could hot-wire it, and he could get a title so I could get it licensed. (Bob had a side-job wrenching for a fly-by-night used car lot. They had accumulated a desk drawer full of old titles. Back then, junkyards would take cars with or without the title.)

With Bob’s encouragement, and with visions of me in that no-cost coupe running through my mind, I went back to the White Castle. I talked to the manager who told me he didn’t know who owned the Ford, and if it wasn’t removed from his lot soon he was going to have it towed. That’s all I needed to hear! 

A few days later, on a sunny late-winter afternoon, we went to get that Ford. I put jumper cables on the battery and shoveled snow while Bob hot-wired the coil. It started right up. I was afraid I couldn’t drive from the wood crate, so he drove it home. It ran great.

The title Bob got from the car lot drawer was for a 1949; close enough, most cops checking the registration wouldn’t know the difference. I spent the next month getting it usable: ignition switch with a key, black vinyl seats from a wrecked Corvair, department store vinyl fabric covering the door cards, brake shoes, touch-up paint over the rust. I never did get a headliner installed; that was (and still is) above my abilities. It was a cobbled together teenager’s car, but it looked good to me, and it ran great.

My new Ford was in front of the pizza joint across the street from the White Castle nearly every evening, until one night the real owner appeared with the police. I won’t go into all the drama that followed, that would be more of a human interest story than a car story. The owner turned out to be a nice man, refused to press charges in spite of the pressure he got from the police to do so, and sold me the car for $225, what it was worth before I did all the work on it. So now I owned my car legitimately with a proper title, and for the next couple years I drove that 50 flathead proudly. It was a coupe!