[AMC-List] Flower power

["Mahoney, John" <JMahoney@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>
Others have explained what is a flower car.  They came into use because, except for maybe, south of the Mason-Dixon line, a funeral director wouldn't want to haul flowers, and other hardware to the cemetary in a pickup truck.
<<

And trucks became that only option when most large open touring cars (or phaetons or 4-door convertibles or whatever you care to call 'em) that'd earlier hauled flowers, largely ceased being made.  Consider 1940 as the point-of-change.  Consider how valuable rare '40s touring cars are today

http://local.aaca.org/wisconsin/classifieds.htm     

even more so if they're rare and open to dreams. 

http://www.sportscarmarket.com/profiles/2006/May/American/index.html

>>
This is slightly off-topic, but somewhat related.  My past experience with another professional car was

It was a great trip and a great car. Haight-Asbury in a vintage Pontiac ambulance in 1968 was an experience.
<<

Off-topic is what makes life interesting, so thanks for the story, Joe.

Although I hadn't yet graduated from prep school and entered college, I spent the summers of '68, '69, and '70 in California --- first year I was pedaling up and down those hills and practicing for lessons with Gregor Piatigorsky (given, since I was not a student in his USC studio, at his beautiful Brentwood home) and the next two I was working up from busboy to room service waiter at the Bel Air.  During those heights of so much that history now counts as unbelievable post-war change in America, all that was "happening" then seemed to be happening right there, somewhere in CA.  The protests, the music, the "scene" --- wow!

CA car life was all around me and the muscle car era was in its heyday.  I was "the kid" among the kids I met those summers, 'cuz the other kids who worked at that hotel were 19 and over, in junior college, and could compare notes on cool cars --- every one of them American-made --- which they drove daily (gas was 25 cents per gallon!) I was still dreaming about.

They spent every penny on their SSs and 4-4-2s and Roadrunners (not one drove an AMC car, though) that they didn't spend chasing girls (I liked the 23-year-old elementary-school teacher who worked there as a barmaid but, since I wasn't yet 18, by CA law I couldn't even step into the bar area to chat her up [and she gave me her "nice puppy" treatment when we -did- talk outside that "no-go" zone]), but since I was still SAVING to buy a drivable car (which would turn out to be no more muscular than a 383 Coronet), those dudes seemed way cooler then than I dreamt of ever becoming.  They had the long blond hair, they had the surfboards, they had The Carpenters' ("They Long To Be) Close To You" on 8-track, and I had only spent some summers in LaLaLand.  As a dumb dork from New York and a geoduck from Puget Sound.

Today, they may be fat bald old men who drive Toyota trucks in Topanga, and the second-grade teacher may drive her -grandkids- to second grade, but in my mind they're still cool and hot and it's still the summers of love and sunshine and cars that made America what it was way back then.  I still want to take the wheel of that headwaiter's new Cadillac (he was a 60-something Italian immigrant with looks like Caesar Romero's, aplomb like Prince Philip's, and earnings like --- well, according to the staff gossip --- like that of some of the diners he served ($80,000 was still -something- in 1969, when the base price of his DeVille was still under $6000...): I would push the button, drop the top, and cruise down Sunset to sunset in Santa Monica.  It would be an experience.  And it's why "history" is such fun.                 

Last week, I left you with a limerick (or a riddle or whatever you care to call it) to which one of you actually responded (Thanks!) but if any others read (or reasoned or ruminated or whatever you'd care to call it) also and would like an answer, I'd better post it before leaving again.

The rhyme was reasoned by verse:    

There once was a Mustang Hornet
Built to be one of one.
It really was green
But so rarely seen,
Ford fans asked,
"What'd become?"

The response will be but by prose: 

"Mustang Hornet" not Rambler Mustang, so

http://www.conceptcars.it/usa/xr400.htm

was -not- the intended one of one.

"Green" was -green-, not "green"

http://www.epa.gov/emissweb/

or Big and Bad -and- Green

http://tinyurl.com/pem5a

(Borrowed that WSW to fix a flat en route to the show?)

or even a -real- "Green" Hornet 

http://www.artcars.com/greenmobile/

(Why paint a Prius "pink" if you can buy a green AMC?)

and not a black Imperial driven by "The Green Hornet"  

http://www.theblackbeauty.com/historyii.htm

but a green Ford Mustang called the "Green Hornet" ---

The real one-off 1968 Shelby G. T. NOTCHBACK prototype!

So bite the Bullitt and dig deeper into auto history.

You will have lots of fun.

http://www.exp500.com/

http://bradbarnett.net/mustangs/timeline/67-68/68/

http://tinyurl.com/zbo6h

See?  Didn't I say that you would have something [somewhat AMC-related and somewhat interesting] to tell [some of] your Mustang friends now?

Some of them may think a "Green Hornet" is just a dumb car by dead AMC.

You can turn them on to history.

You can be cool --- and hot.

Like California.

I'm gone.

Have fun. 

PS - Frank, Tom, or someone --- I looked at: 

http://www.wps.com/mailman/listinfo/amc-list

but don't see a "suspend & post" option for those of us reading online.

If these individual e-mails keep coming, I'll get an "exceeded" message and you'll get a "bounce" problem, so until the new system can be fully explained, please turn my subscription off.  I'll be back in a week or so.  Thanks much.


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