Bringing Home the Duncan Phyfe: Chapter 1

[Sequentially post-dated from July 17, 2007.]

When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941,my dad and mom were 12 and 11: two Junior High kids that barely knew each other's names. Ten years and two months later, they were married and headed for a Washington, D.C. honeymoon in Dad's '39 Ford. A week later they settled into a small three-room apartment just a few blocks from the high school where they fell in love.

Doesn't it feel strange to consider that a "1939 Ford" was no older in the year 1951 than a 1995 model is as I write today. My daughter drives a '95 Saturn, and it doesn't seem that old to me. But the thought of ’39 Ford in the Fifties, sounds old. Oddly enough, there is another reason that this car did not look that old on the road...

In the 40's, the world my parents and their parents knew was hanging by a thread. During WW II, progress on the domestic front took a back seat to "doing without" for the war effort.

The 1942 cars models were in production when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, but those car designs did not change for the duration of the war. The auto plants were converted to military production and while a few cars were still being made each year, they were in fact the same car as the year before.

If your family was among the few to buy a "new" Ford in 1945, it was a 1942 Ford. If you bought the new Ford in this second picture (circa 1948), it was a 1942 Ford with only a slightly different grill, which still looked very similar to the 1939 model in the first picture. Not until well after the war (1949) did Ford begin rolling new designs off its Detroit assembly lines. So in that sense, in 1950, my dad's '39 Ford looked as "up to date" as a 2004 model might look today, but all that was about to change.

In the next few years Detroit quickly made up for lost time by completely skipping a decade of gradual change. After hunkerin' down and pulling together through the Great Depression and a global war, America wanted to...needed to...see some signs that the best of the 20th Century was yet to come. Seemingly overnight, it was as if beautiful metal butterflies emerged from the drab cocoons that had been sitting by the curb.

I was born in 1956. By the time I was old enough to know what a car was, many of them had the lines of a rocket. Ours, of course, did not. The six of us were still piling in and out of that '39 Ford—by then 20 years old. Dad was driving a Bell truck to and from work and a newer car was just not in the budget. I later learned that it was in that old Ford that Dad taught Mom to drive, and that was the car that brought home the Duncan Phyfe.

This is the story of their first year together—before any of us kids were on the scene. It will take a while to get to that part of about the table, but stories about life and love are a lot like life itself. It’s best not to hurry such things… to take it slow as if you’re strolling as you read.
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Originally posted Wednesday, 7-11-07. Moved for sequence with Part II.