Tom Wise drove a vintage convertible through suburban Park Ridge last week, with his wife Gail’s hair blowing in the breeze, just as it has for almost exactly six decades since the day she bought the iconic vehicle.
As Wise navigated the car back to his Park Ridge home’s garage, a passing neighbor in a truck stopped to remark. “I’ve always noticed the Mustang here.”
When Wise informed him it was the first Ford Mustang ever sold in the United States, to Gail Wise, then a 22-year-old rookie third grade teacher, on April 15, 1964, his eyes widened.
Gale Wise never intended to be a pace-setter with the Mustang, the sporty model which caused a stir with young people because it was so different from their parents’ huge sedans of the time. She simply wanted a new convertible, having already driven father Cleadis Brown’s 1949 and 1957 Ford convertibles, when the pair stopped in Johnson Ford, at Cicero and Diversey Avenues in Chicago near their then-home, on April 15, 1964.
No convertible was available on the floor, but the salesman did have something interesting in back. There was the Mustang, covered by a tarp, not supposed to be for sale for two more days until Henry Ford II unveiled the car at the New York World’s Fair.
But Cleadis Brown had the $3,447 sale price in cash (as a loan to his daughter) plus a 1958 Impala worth $400 in a trade-in as incentives, so the salesman opted to jump the gun with Gail so long as she did not take the car for a test drive. He could have cost Johnson Ford dearly.
“If Ford had found out he had sold the car early, they might have taken the dealership away,” said Tom Wise.
No American could have missed the publicity over the Mustang in the spring of 1964. The car was fodder for news magazine cover stories. As the then-Gail Brown drove the car from her teaching job in west suburban Berkeley to her Northwest Side home, bystanders gawked at her and the car.
“I felt like a movie star,” she said. “I didn’t go looking for attention. Everybody was happy to see this car. Everybody was waving, asking me to slow down.”
One time she followed a Chicago police squad car. “He waved me to drive up next to him so he could see the car up close,” she said.
Wise arranged for her $5,000 rookie teacher’s salary to be spread out over 12 months so she could enjoy a leisurely summer. That enabled her to take trips to the beach where the car attracted even more attention.
The world was far different, and seemingly more quaint, in the spring of 1964.
As Gail Brown drove away from Johnson Ford, she could press the button on the car’s AM-only radio for WLS 890 to hear the Beatles snare the top two songs, “Can’t Buy Me Love” and “Twist and Shout,” according to Top 40 Weekly.com. The Fab Four also got “Do You Want to Know a Secret” at No. 5 and “She Loves You” at No. 8.
If she switched to 720 to hear WGN-Radio’s Cubs broadcast with Jack Quinlan and Lou Boudreau, Brown could hear the play-by-play of right fielder Lou Brock beginning his third season starting for the North Siders. And just tooling around the city, she’d pass many corner newsstands selling four Chicago daily newspapers.
In contrast to today’s cars, the Mustang had simple features. The dashboard has only a few instruments in addition to the AM radio. The right passenger seat does not adjust backward, and only the front seats have lap belts; shoulder harnesses arrived later.
The historic car has called Park Ridge home since 1977.
First of a series of distinctive models midwifed by automative impresario Lee Iacocca, the Wises’ “pony car” has already gone through a complete body and mechanical restoration after rust and aging engine woes threatened its existence.
Saving wear and tear on its piston strokes and tire treads, the Wises put it onto flatbed trucks to travel to the Mustang’s 50th anniversary at Ford headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan, to the personal museum of its designer, Gale Halderman, and to Midwest car shows. Gail Wise got to rub shoulders with Ford family scion Edsel Ford onstage.
Affixed with a 1964 Illinois license plate and 1965 Chicago city sticker, the Mustang also benefited from relatively good fortune to celebrate 60 years in the family’s possession.
In the early days, Gail Wise managed to make it home without abandoning the rear-wheel drive car in snowdrifts — the fate of tens of thousands of vehicles — as Chicago’s great blizzard of January 1967 dumped 23 inches of snow on the city. As it was, Wise was blocked by the blizzard from sheltering the Mustang in the garage, so it had to stay on the street as the snow covered it.
When Tom Wise, who served on submarines, was away on Navy duty and he and his wife lived in Charleston, South Carolina, in the late 1960s, the car stayed garaged with her parents in Chicago rather than piling up miles on the road. And when Tom Wise decided he no longer could drive the aging car to work in Bellwood in 1979, he simply stashed it away in the garage in Park Ridge until he was ready to restore it 27 years later. The Mustang has just 68,000 miles on the odometer.
Tom Wise said the fastback Mustang was introduced in the fall of 1964 along with a souped-up engine more robust than his 168-horsepower model. In pop culture, the fastback became Steve McQueen’s pursuing car in the great car chase sequence in the1968 movie “Bullitt.” Wise said the movie Mustang still exists and was recently sold, but could not pin down the identity of the present owner.
The Wises thought of selling their classic not long ago. “But it fell through due to capital gains taxes,” Tom Wise said. The present plan is to allow the car to eventually go to the family estate, with their four children not liable for capital gains, he said.
As summer approaches with its convertible weather, neighbors who wave at the Wises as they motor past will likely get their version of horsing around. During the long stretch when Tom Wise worked to restore the car, he had it outfitted with an auxiliary horn. Now, when the Wises press a button, a horse-like “whinnying” sound comes forth from the car’s innards, reminding people the so-called “pony car,” despite its age, is still ready to ride.
