As told by Gary Gordon
It was a spring day in 1959 in Wichita, Kansas when I spotted a white 1949 two-door Ford on Lynn Lowry's used car lot on south Broadway. I stopped to look at it and fell in love with the little Ford. Someone had kept good care of it and there were signs of customizing on the car. The salesman fired it up and the dual exhaust manifolds and the dual pipes sounded like only Ford flatheads do. I noted a hot ignition system and a clean, well-kept engine. The salesman said the last owner said it has a race cam and other parts to make it go faster. I soon paid the $200.00 asking price and was on my way. The car ran good the next couple of days so I decided to take it on a trip I planned up the Kansas turnpike to Kansas City, Missouri, a little over 200 miles away. The Kansas Turnpike is a four-lane divided, modern highway. I left Wichita about 9 a.m. on a weekday. Since you pay to drive on this highway and since it was a weekday, there were very few cars coming or going. This is hard to imagine in this day of crowded interstates! I had not gone very far when to my surprise a brand new Buick shot by with a brand new Chevy on its tail! I was wondering how fast the old Ford would go anyway so I put it in overdrive and stepped on the gas. I hoped to be able to see if the Buick or if the Chevy would win. I knew these cars would do around 120 MPH as I had lucky friends who could afford them. Well. The old Ford went up to 90 pretty easy, then slowly continued to accelerate to 92 - 93 - 94. I figured she would do 100, maybe 105 if I was lucky. The other two cars were a good ways away by now and fading. Slowly the needle on the speedometer came to 100 MPH. The speedometer was round shaped and it stopped at 100, but there was no peg there. Zero was at about the 7 o'clock position and 100 at about the 4 o'clock position. I was amazed when the needle went past what I guessed was 110 MPH, and was still moving. Soon the needle was pointing straight down and the two cars were no longer pulling away. I can tell you a lot was going on in that car, the least to say, my knuckles had turned white! Both front windows were open, and being a single guy, I had a lot of junk and trash in the car. The wind would pick up an empty beer can and slam it around the car almost breaking the windshield and then out the window like a cannon shell. Trash would shoot around and do a crazy dance in the air. The car was handling strangely. I was trying to get into the fast lane very slowly. I could tell that one quick move on the steering wheel and the car would roll across the prairie and destroy itself. The speedometer was pointing straight down and slowly heading for zero. The overpasses were a mile or more apart but they just kept popping up, they looked like giant cement fly swatters, and I had to aim for the small hole! How fast were the telephone poles going by and did the white dash lines blend together?
(end of story)
