On my birth-day, in 1957, my grandparents in Tennessee gave me a toy Edsel...A marketing and styling mistake by Ford Motor Co., a car only produced, I believe, for 3 years, the famous horse-collar front grille...the model is in popular colors of the era, swimming-pool aqua and white...
It was always kept at Grandma and Grandpa Brownell's in Tennessee...When we would travel there from Dallas every, oh, other year, I would, on arrival, run in and ask where the Edsel was, and Granddaddy would bring it out...It got played with in the dirt, in the grass, on the asphalt driveway, it got "customized" in the late-60's as I became a teenager, it all but got forgotten in the mid-70's, went to my parents' home in the mid-80's...Now I have it in Sweden in 2006, it is now 49 years old...Fell off the shelf last month, which "customized" it even more...
It reminds me of home, grand-parents, Tennessee, great cars, Sprite on ice drunk out of colored aluminum cups in Grandma Brownell's kitchen, fireflies, screen-porches, Fontana Dam, Smokey Mountains, and even Granddaddy's own forest-green 1959 Buick LeSabre with wrap-around glass, green Naughahyde and Pep O Mints everywhere...Reminds me of sisters, of playing "cars" on the dirt-piles in front of our house Dad ordered to construct our suburban lawn but that we kids turned into Interstate highway networks stretching into the neighbor's yard...
In the early 70's the toy Edsel looked like this, during the
Blacklight Poster Years, when Karl Bowman and I made plastic dragster models, when Greg Chapman and I looked at motorcycle magazines, when Paul Martin and I sat on beanbags in his room and listened to Whole Lotta Love by Led Zeppelin on his direct-drive turntable and a red light-bulb blinked to the music and we drank Dr. Pepper...
