Brian Evans 67 Coupe


Car of the Month for Jan / Feb 2022

    As some of you may know, my history with Mus-tangs goes back a lot further than March of 2005, when I finally got around to joining the Golden Hills Mustang Club, after my membership with Vintage Mus-tang Owners Association in San Jose ended upon my 1997 move back home to Fairfield, where I grew up. My history with Mustangs actually goes back to the mid 1970’s.
   I first took notice of the Mustang as being a pretty cool car in the mid 1970’s, when my dad traded four of his vintage model airplane engines (worth about $1,200) for a ten-year-old 1966 Wimbledon white coupe with a light blue interior. Although it had “only” the base 289 2-barrel V8, I remember this car had plenty of “get up and go”. When I later started driving it, I’m sure I chirped the tires now and again when my dad was out of ear shot. When I turned 16 during my sophomore year of high school, I mostly drove this car, or occasionally my dad’s 1973 F350 truck with the big block 390 engine, which wasn’t kind to a high school kid’s budget for gas.
   When it was time to start looking for my own car af-ter a couple months of borrowing his cars, I figured the best and smartest thing to do would be to buy a car similar to my dad’s, and definitely not a gas thirsty big-block truck! From the classified ads in the trusty Daily Republic newspaper, the first car I remember looking at was a late 60’s Mercury Cougar, basically (I would later learn) a “cousin” to the Mustang. I don’t remember if it was the price or the condition, but something about the Cougar just didn’t speak to me. The second car I made an appointment to see was a 1967 Mustang, just one year newer than my dad’s. The ad was pretty basic:
   “1967 MUSTANG – new valves, new tires, new lifters, new oil pump. Must sell, $1,000, 425-xxxx”
Color? Engine size? I knew what tires were (duh!) but those other “new’ items listed in the ad I was only vaguely aware of! Not much to go on, but the price sounded like something in my wheelhouse, so I made an appointment to go look at it.
   Pulling into the apartments on Cordelia Road in Suisun, I see a red mustang coupe that looked pretty decent. However, it didn’t appear to be recently washed or otherwise cleaned up for sale (read stray McDonald’s cups and French fry bags on the floor), so I figured the guy put the same lack of effort into showing the car as he did writing his classified ad!
  I don’t recall my mom and I taking it for a test drive, but I did start it up and rev the engine a little bit and thought to myself…this feels right! The odometer read 23,175, which I knew with a 13-year-old car would really be 123,175. To this day four decades later, I recall being impressed with this console thing between the two bucket seats that had holders for the seat belts and this trick little roll-up accordion style door under the radio! Oh, the things I could stash in there! The seller wanted to go right to DMV to sign it over and get his money, so I rode with him, and my mom followed us across town to the DMV. I guess this was my “test drive”. When it was our turn, the clerk informed us that there was still the prior year’s registration due on the vehicle, in the amount of $14. My mom promptly wrote the seller a check for $986 and I now owned my first set of wheels! I was informed shortly after arriving home that I would need to hand over the $500 in cash I had been gifted from my grandmother and begin making payments for the $486 balance from the afterschool job I had re-cently found.
   The next morning when it was time to leave for school, the car cranked and cranked but wouldn’t start. I quickly called the seller and he said, “oh yea, I forgot to tell you, when it’s cold you have to pour a little gas into the carburetor! Open the trunk and use that little gas can” Great, thanks dude!
In those first few days I spent a lot of time washing the car, vacuuming the interior and making a list of all the things my dad said we should do: change the oil, give it a tune-up with new plugs, points, condenser, dis-tributor cap…I was learning a lot on the fly. And clean-ing up the dirty carburetor and automatic choke with some carb cleaner eliminated the need for the “pour gas down the carb cold-starting method!” My mom and stepdad made their own list of things for me to do to the car, consisting of the following:
1). Remove the small bumper sticker that was placed on the trunk to the left of the mustang lettering that said “Ass, Gas or Grass…Nobody Rides for Free”
2). Remove the sticker placed on the passenger side dash that said “Sit on a Happy Face”
  I kid you not! And what I would give now to have taken pictures of those stickers!
Now I probably would have removed these stickers on my own in due time, as I’ve never liked any kind of stickers on cars, but as a 16-year-old being told to do something… ”Fine, mom (rolls eyes with her not look-ing) …anything else?”
  I began reading everything I could about the Mustang, and soon discovered that there was actually a monthly magazine dedicated just to the 1965-73 Mustangs called Mustang Monthly, published out of Florida by Larry Dobbs and his editor Donald Farr. A $12 or $15 annual subscription was soon mailed in. They also pub-lished a book called the Mustang Recognition Guide, which had every detail about the cars and their op-tions, by year and with photographs, for each of the first-generation years up to 1973. I still have my very worn and tattered copy of this book, along with all the magazines. This book is where I first learned about Shelby Mustangs. From the book I also learned that my car was a “luxury” version, being a body style 65B with the deluxe interior (called Interior Décor Group. In 1965-66 it was referred to as the “Pony Interior”). The 65A body style was a base car, and 65C was a rare (in this case “rare” means nobody wanted it!) bench seat option.
  Other options my car had, besides the deluxe brushed aluminum interior:
A Code (5th digit in the VIN), which was the 225horse 4 Barrel V8
Automatic Transmission
Power Front Disc Brakes
Power Steering
Console (previously mentioned above when I firstsat in the car)
Factory Air Conditioning (1967 was the first yearthe Mustang came from the factory with air condi-tioning, as it was built into the dash, compared tothe 1965-66 under dash dealer mounted unit)
AM-FM Radio
   My dad said I really got lucky with finding a car withpower front disc brakes and factory air conditioning. Iwould learn many years later that only roughly 15% ofALL Ford vehicles produced in 1967 had air condition-ing. When I just recently ordered the original invoicefrom Kevin Marti (guest speaker at our upcoming MCAShow Banquet Dinner), it shows air conditioning wasthe most expensive option at $356.09 on a $2,461.46vehicle, which is 14% of the base car cost. The powerfront disc brakes, on the other hand, were only a$64.77 option.
   I soon became a popular guy on the Armijo campus,being one of the only sophomores with a driver licenseand his own car. I was making $3.25 an hour coachingyouth sports after school for the Suisun Rec Depart-ment (minimum wage was $2.90 at the time), so I wasglad to drive my friends around, as long as they putsome of their lunch money in the gas tank, just as Idid! Throughout the rest of my last two years of highschool, I literally put gas in my car $3, 4 or $5 at atime, which was generally buying 3, 4 or 5 gallons ofgas, give or take.    “Oh, you guys want ME to drive tothe Napa football game this Friday night? That’s twodollars each for gas AND you’re buying me whatever Iwant at the snack stand!” Good times with the newcar!
   After six months of driving the car which took me intosummer and 40 hours per week of work for my step-dad’s construction company, it was time for my firstmajor upgrade, which was putting Cragar chrome fivespoke mag wheels and new 60 series tires on the car!Chicks are starting to take notice now! (Lol) Fortu-nately, I had the foresight to save the original stock. wheels. After owning the car for about a year, and at about 130,000 miles, my dad and I figured it was time to drop in a new engine, choosing the “short block” re-build approach, where you take everything from your old engine that bolts to the block…intake manifold, heads, water pump, exhaust manifolds, and oil pan…refurbish them and reinstall on a new block that has all new internals, pistons, crankshaft, etc. I probably had the carburetor rebuilt by then as well. One thing that I “forgot” to re-install on the engine was all the original smog equipment, but again, I had the foresight to keep it and not toss it into the trash (or Suisun slough)!
   Soon I was off to college at San Jose State Univer-sity, and this car faithfully made the 150-mile round trip once or twice a month when I came home for weekend visits. In these years I remember it devel-oped overheating issues, which led to a new radiator, and the C4 automatic transmission was rebuilt after it started clunking into and out of gear and turning into a “slip and slide, power glide” tranny!
  This car continued to be my one and only daily driver for the first 18 months into my first job after college graduation, working as an accountant for one of the Big 8 accounting firms. I actually suffered a bit driv-ing to clients’ offices all over the Bay Area in the hot summer months with a suit and tie on! Some of my friends had bought brand new boring cars like 1987 Honda Accords … (that my grandmother would be proud to drive, I thought to myself!) Conversations went like this, “Dude, that’s a cool old car, but what is it, 20 years old? Why you still driving it?” I guess it was still just the car I preferred to own and drive, plus it was paid for, and I spent less to keep it on the road than my peers were spending on car payments! I had also begun putting some “improvement” money into it, like new original seat upholstery to replace the lovely rips and foam coming out of the seams of the 20-year-old original seats. New door panels were alsopurchased, as I grew tired of dealing with black elec-trical tape used for door panel repairs becoming sticky goo during warm weather! But I never got around to getting the air conditioning fixed.
   By now I had been driving the car for nine years, and the odometer now read 5,000 miles, which was really 205,000 on the chassis and 75,000 miles on the new engine that was put in at 130,000 during high school. With my bank account growing with every paycheck, I thought it was time to get a second car for everyday driving and keep this one to restore someday. So, what did I buy? A modern car? Nope…of course it was a near-restored ’67 candy apple red GT Fastback, A code 289 4V with a four speed! I drove this Mustang for eight more years until 1996 when I finally bought my first modern car, a 1996 Thunderbird. Finally, I had air conditioning and gas mileage near 20 MPG!
   During my 40+ years of ownership, there was only one time I considered selling it, and that was in 1984 when the 20th anniversary model “GT 350” came out. I was taken in by the magazine and TV ads, but when I actu-ally took one on a test drive, I wasn’t that impressed with what I was getting for the money! I would have had to sell the ’67 and taken out a loan, which didn’t make sense for a college student.
   Over the last 25 years since 1996, I have been occa-sionally buying parts for it and stashing them away. There has always been a plan to get it back on the road, and my current plan is to just do a rolling resto-ration rather than a full blown concours restoration. The starting point has been to have the original black and gold plates restored by Jim’s    California License Plates; a Northern CA frequent swap meet vendor (see the new ad in this newsletter). They came out perfect, and they’re displayed in my house to keep the motiva-tion up! I’m now working on a plan to move the car from my impossible-to-work-in metal garage (cold as ice in the winter; hotter than Hades in the summer!) to the house garage, where I can begin to do some tear-down work. A high school reunion is in the near future, and I hope to at least have the car on the road by then!

By Brian Evans