Word: mustangers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...most talked about - and least seen - auto of the year is the Ford Mustang, a new sports car that the company has been guarding for public introduction on April 13. Thus it was little wonder that Fred Olmsted, the automotive editor of Detroit's Free Press, stopped in astonishment last week when, in a Detroit parking lot, he spotted a red convertible emblazoned with the insignia of a galloping stallion...
Olmsted recognized the car as the top-secret Mustang, rushed to a telephone to summon a photographer. Within less than ten minutes, the Free Press had the first public pictures of the car, and Ford saw its carefully tailored plans for secrecy shattered...
...first, Ford officials tried to per suade the Free Press not to run the pictures. When that failed, they began to look for the culprit. Since the Mus tang's license plate was visible in one of the photos, the investigation did not take long. The Mustang's driver was none other than the nephew of Ford Chairman Henry Ford II, Walter Buhl ("Buhlie") Ford III, at 20 already something of a legendary cut up around Grosse Pointe, the baronial suburb east of Detroit...
Buhlie's mother, Josephine ("Dody") Ford, is the younger sister of Henry II and the wife of Walter Buhl Ford II, an industrial designer who is no kin to the automotive dynasts. Hearing all the talk of the Mustang, Dody asked her brother to let her try it. (Henry himself has been driving one on the freeway between Dearborn and Grosse Pointe, where the chances of being spotted by a photographer are slight.) When Buhlie cast his eye on the fire-engine-red Mustang in the family garage, he could not resist taking a spin, then somewhat carelessly parked...
Though Buhlie's exploit caused something of an uproar at Ford, the pictures certainly proved that the Mustang, which goes into mass production this week at Ford's River Rouge assembly plant in Dearborn, is indeed handsome. It has a rectangular, Ferrari-like front grille and a low, racy silhouette, but its most attractive feature is probably its price-less than $2,500. At any rate, Buhlie was not letting the matter disrupt his own plans. A few days after he unmasked the Mustang, he and Barbara Monroe Posselius, 18, were married in Grosse Pointe. The happy couple...