Tom Geiger

I never had a problem with Mustang IIs. In fact they are the original retro car, way before retro came into style. Just look at the 1965 Mustang styling cues... instantly recognizable as a Mustang. And by the way, the original Mustang was marketed as a girls car! When I met my wife in 1978 she had a Mustang II coupe pretty much the same as the one in the above photo from Charlies Angels. Same color and vinyl top, only hers had hubcaps and a V6 automatic. It was a nice car to drive, and we took it on a few long trips. In 1979 it was traded in on a new Fox Capri with a V8. That car was a never ending problem from the day it came off the showroom floor. I would've liked to keep the Mustang II but we couldn't afford to keep it and get the new car. To add insult to injury the dealer sold it to someone who lived a few blocks from my in laws house, so we'd see it parked there every time we drove by! The first year Fox Capri was eventually traded in on a Nissan Stanza (needed our first family car) in 1982 with 34,000 troubled miles on it. For a new car we never had any confidence in driving it anywhere since it was nothing but trouble.

Like most bad jokes, modify the participants to match your situation!

Explorers? Don't let the lack of kits stop ya! Here's a few Maisto (if I remember correctly) Explorers in the dreaded die-cast. Take them apart and they are indeed models!

There's a German Auto Conference and three engineers are taking turns using the one sink in the men's room. First the engineer from BMW washes his hands, telling the other two, "At BMW we are very precise in our work. Notice how I wash first the right hand, then the left hand in exactly the same way." Next the Mercedes engineer steps up to the sink, "At Mercedes we are very thorough. See how I wash my hands in a rolling fashion to wash them uniformly" The VW engineer just shrugs his shoulders and says, "At VW we don't pee on our hands!" and walks away.

Some trivia for ya... The Taunus V4 front wheel drive set up was also used by Saab, who bought the units from Ford. That was standard in the Saab Sonnet and also in the 95 series, I owned a 95 wagon. It was really a wild sight when you opened the hood. The tiny little v4 sat completely in front of the front suspension, with the transaxle mounted behind it in the same way the trans would mount to a rwd car. Wild!

Jason, I think it's always been that way. When I was your age back in the 1970s, I started my own lawn business. I bought my own lawn mower and started mowing the lawns in my neighborhood when I was 14. The first year mowed 10 lawns a week with a power push mower. I took those earnings and bought a small riding mower so I could do more. That doubled my production. Kids in the neighborhood got jealous a wanted a piece of the action. I saw that if I had help, someone running after me with the push mower and trimmers, I could move faster on the tractor. So I hired kids at an hourly wage to help. None lasted more than a day or two... back breaking work they said! Their parents were enablers for their lazy kids. One father came yelling at me that I needed to "take turns" driving the tractor with his Jimmy. Another called my father complaining that I was taking advantage of his kid and I needed to "split the earnings" with him. Um no. Business 101. I started the business, I bought and maintained all the equipment and I had the contracts! After that I stopped trying to get help and just did the volume I could do myself.

Yes she did! And at four I thought that would be so cool!

Maybe this one John? Photo taken outside the Liars show one year.. that was my Vic

Yea, I guess we'll never see a pan handler frozen to death in Arizona or Puerto Rico...

If you don't know how to get a photo from your cell phone... email it to yourself and pick it up on your PC.

I'll admit that I'm not a big Corvette fan. I have nothing against them but they just weren't part of my car experience.

The Diversified Modelerz had their show this past Saturday. I couldn't be there because I was away but from the photos and videos on their Facebook page, the show was a resounding success. This is a group of young guys who are into modern subjects. I saw many of our herd, the aging hairy mammals in the photos, but most important for our hobby, there were a bunch of young folks I don't know in the photos too... and I know everyone in the hobby in NJ. That means there are a lot more modelers than our small group. And that's a good thing!

My point... and they LOVE American cars! That can be a big positive for USA, as long as we don't screw that up!

Actually the snow will melt if ignored. Leaves will hunker down for the long haul. At this time of year it's best to do a quick blow of the yard every few days. If you wait until the yard is knee deep... well, moving those leaves is like driving cattle! Which is why I wasn't waiting for Toro to ship me a repaired blower several weeks from now.

Guzel! Cok Guzel arkadasım!

And since we're enjoying pictures of old family cars... Here's my mother, sister and me standing next to our new 1962 Studebaker Lark sedan! "Mommy, what's that chewing sound?" "Don't worry Tommy, that's just the Studebaker rusting." And here's our trusty 1966 Valiant somewhere in Switzerland probably 1970. That's my grandfather in the picture

another thought... those 1950s developments were designed for one car families. They had one car garages, and at best held a second car in the driveway. There was no accounting that as the families aged, and kids started to drive, that some of these homes would house 4-5 drivers and each would own a car. The streets were pretty narrow in some of them, leaving only room for a car to squeeze by if a car was parked on either curb.

Okay... how I spent my afternoon.... I was away for a week and saw that fall had really happened in my absence.. the yard is full of leaves. So I got out my Toro electric blower / vacuum and started to blow off the back yard. I got about 15 minutes into it and the blower slowly slowed down and quit. Turning it off and on again would give a little blast and then it stopped. The thing just died. I checked my information and found a receipt telling me I bought it new in May. That's five months ago. I bought it in the spring when the last of three Black & Decker units actually caught fire. So I switched to Toro. Last spring I did the final spring blowing of what leaves were left from winter. And this was probably the third time I used it. Junk! I check my Toro book and it has a two year warranty. So I call the good folks at Toro and got a woman who actually was American. She told me I could mail it to them at my own cost and wait a few weeks for them to look at it and possibly repair it. Or I could take it to their local authorized repair place, which was a town away. I opted for that. I get to this Toro dealer and they tell me that they don't do Toro electric tools. I tell the lady my plight and she tells me to take it back to Home Depot. Note that all my Toro info tells me not to do that. So I head to Home Depot. At Home Depot the guy looks at my six month old receipt and I explain that it was used twice, the thing isn't even dirty and the vacuum bag is still neatly folded in the box. He agrees to issue me a store refund. Then I can buy a new one. I then explain that I used a Home Depot $5 off coupon and I want an even exchange so I'm not out that $5. He doesn't see why I'm arguing over $5, but gets his boss who tells me to go to the aisle and get one for even exchange. Of course once in the aisle, they don't have any. They tell me they have them in stock and rustle up a stock guy who goes out back and then comes back empty handed. So they tell me there's another Home Depot 10 miles up the road. I know where it is. I tell them that I already had spent a half hour fighting with them and I don't want to go through that all over again. And can I be assured that they'll even have one? At least I was talking to a manager who said he'd call them. Another 10 minutes and he said that they had the thing in stock (note that the first store's inventory said they had them) and I'm off in the Tracker for the next Home Depot. This time it went better. I got to the returns counter and my new one was sitting there. Still, three stops and about two hours of grief to rectify something that shouldn't have broke in the first place!

It was sad to see homeless panhandlers in Puerto Rico. I was in San Juan and walked along Ashford Avenue, the happening part of town with the beach front hotels. The streets were lined with the unfortunate, none of them getting in your face, but just sitting there jiggling cups. The interesting part is many of them had dogs.

Ron, here's the only photo I can find of my father's work car VW Beetle we had when we lived in Germany. This is a photo of his unit offices in Pirmasens, Germany around 1971. His Beetle is the dark one to the right of the entrance. It was red, note the US spec bumpers which were really unusual in Germany. The story was that a US serviceman bought it new in the US and had it shipped over when he received orders for Germany. Other cars are the typical family cars of that era that Uncle Sam paid to ship for servicemen. The two company vehicles were the Econoline van and if you look to the far left, that's a AMC Ambassador staff car in Army green.

There has to be a reason those are being pressed in the USA. Maybe when they bought the company they inherited a contract with the subcontractor they need to honor. My own thought is that the Lindberg tools may be different than the industry standard and maybe that contractor has the only equipment that will work with them. That was the issue why neither of the big companies bought Johan, their tooling wasn't compatible with the larger companies molding equipment. Anyone know?

I think it's also fair to mention that the entire US economy was different in those days. In the 1950s through 1960s, people lived pretty well working jobs that are low paying today. When we lived in Dayton, Ohio our next door neighbor sold suits at Sears. He had a home in the new Huber Heights subdivision, two cars (I remember one was a Beetle), had two kids and his wife was home full time. Today you couldn't live on the salary for that same job. College degrees were more the exception than the rule, and not having one didn't keep a man from supporting a family. My wife's next door neighbor was a bank teller. He left the house every day in a suit, and took the train into the city. He had a suburban house, two cars and his wife never worked. My wife said people in the neighborhood (okay, maybe the kids!) thought he was important since he counted all the money! Today that job pays around $10 an hour. He lived better than a bank branch manager does today! Entire towns were born in the rush from the cities. I lived in the town of Hazlet, NJ which was a sleepy little farming community in the 1940s. Starting in the early 1950s when the Garden State Parkway was built, opening up these areas making a commute to the city easier, there was a building boom. Much of the town was built in the 1950s, and the final developments were finished up by the late 1960s. There is no downtown Hazlet, town hall is just on one of the main roads, surrounded by development houses. If you look at the aerial photos of the town in the 1940s and then the same photo in the 1970s the difference is amazing. When I wanted to build a house in the 1980s there literally wasn't a single building lot to be had. The town was completely built up at that point. I recently read a post on the Facebook page , "I Grew Up In Hazlet, NJ" where a man who was one of the original occupants of the town in the new developments wrote that he was a construction worker and he had 5 kids and his wife at home. They had 2 cars and he said his pay was spent this way each month: Week one was his house payment. Week two paid for his cars, gas and utility bills. Week three paid all the family's other needs like food, clothing, entertainment. And Week four? They put that into savings for vacations and the future! Can you imagine? Today most 2 income households cannot save an entire week's salary! Times were indeed different.

If someone makes it, they probably list it. Whitney didn't have everything they listed in their store. Much of it was drop shipped by vendors, especially the stuff that was specific to cars like convertible tops and carpet sets. I know that they instructed me to mail the window louvers back to another address.

Yup, I came into the Whitney catalog when I was ten. I had this dream of building my own car from scratch so I started this long list from the catalog. As you can imagine, I got about that far! The thing that got me was that their car applications for parts listed cars that didn't exist... like it would say "64-69 Camaro".. where Camaros started in 1967. Even I knew that when I was a kid. My last foray with Whitney was when was working on my '73 Scamp in the late 1980s. They offered a rear window louver listing '73 Scamp-Dart Sport. I get this thing and it no way was designed for my car. The Scamp had a concave rear window and this part was straight. I had to go to UPS to return it.

Ah, all four reasons why I don't appear on video! My day? I thought I'd get ahead of the leaves and took my electric leaf blower out and got about 15 minutes into it and the sucker just died! I can get it to start, blow erratically for a few seconds and die. I check my records and I bought this Toro piece of junk this spring! It is still shiny and the vacuum bag and attachments are still in the box. I see it has a 2 year warranty so I'll be calling Toro's 800 number in the morning... At least the Black and Decker ones lasted two years before they burst into flames!