Auto-Biography: 1954 Ford Customline V8 – Our First Car; It Wasn’t Exactly What I Was Hoping For

(2026. A new chapter that I’ve finally gotten to thanks to finally finding a baby-blue ’54 Customline just like ours)

Our first car was a highly anticipated event, at least for seven year-old me, having obsessed on cars since my very first memories of occasionally riding in them in Austria. In my mind, it was the single biggest thing to look forward to as a result of our move to the US in 1960, and I had visions of a brand new 1960…Pontiac? Buick? Or at least a Chevrolet magically waiting for us upon our arrival in Iowa City.

Sadly, there was nothing in the driveway at 606 Holt Avenue, and what did finally appear was initially a rather serious let down: a dumpy old ’54 Ford sedan. But I came around to appreciating it.

Those first days and weeks in Iowa City had a dream-like quality; everything was so new and different. The late-August air was hot and humid, the neighbors were amazingly friendly and casual, showing up at our door to say hello and drop off some food or such, having a (rented) ranch-style house of our own, and a big city park with a swimming pool just a block away. It was all a bit of sensory overload, and then just some days later I had to go to school, not knowing a word of English. Thanks to a kid in the class whose parents were also from Austria and  knew some German, I managed to catch on quite quickly and was caught up with the rest of the class in about six weeks. Of course they misspelled my last name in this newspaper article.

Although we lived close enough to the university hospital for my father to walk, which he would do rain, snow or shine for the five years we lived in Iowa City, it soon became pretty compelling to get a car in order to go shopping and such, but more compellingly, to get out and explore the countryside, such as it was in Iowa. After my father got his license, it became obvious that were were going to get a car, but the big question for me was what car?

I was totally smitten by the his-and-hers matching dark blue 1960 Pontiac Bonneville 4-door hardtop and Safari station wagon parked side-by-side in the driveway across the street from our house. Wow! Welcome to America! I’d have been quite happy with just one of them; the only question being which one.

One afternoon when I was playing out front, a brand new 1960 Falcon two-door station wagon I didn’t recognize rolled into the driveway. Aha! This is it! A bit smaller than the Pontiac I’d hoped for, but my father did have a pretty serious thrifty streak. At least it was new and fresh-looking. But no; it was my father’s boss giving him a ride home for some reason; the new Falcon wagon was replacing his wife’s 1949 or 1950 Plymouth two-door all-steel wagon. Oh well.

Then one day my father drove home in a  two-tone 1955 Studebaker 4-door sedan, looking a bit ratty and rusty, and announced that were were going to take it to Chicago to visit some friends, thanks to a German colleague who was lending it to him as an extended test drive, hoping to sell it to him. The German expats in Iowa City were really into to Studebakers back then. Was it the name? Or their rep for their advanced engineering?

The trip to Chicago was exciting; our first road trip. We visited and stayed with some colleagues of my father, one in Evanston and one in a brand new suburb, where I watched Superman on tv for the first time. Wow! This is how kids spend their time in the US, watching tv all the time!

The Studebaker made the trip without any issues, but my father decreed that its brakes were seriously deficient and thus not worthy.

Then one Saturday my father did something a bit out of character, taking him with me an a rather lengthy walk to the Ford dealer downtown, to look for a car. By this time I was pretty sure it wouldn’t be new, but maybe a 1958 Country Squire? I did not get along with my older brother, and the only solution to getting away from his constant pestering was a three-row wagon. Please!

No such luck. Instead the salesman directed him to a baby-blue 1954 Customline 4-door sedan. It looked pretty out of date by the fall of 1960, but at least it had a V8 engine! My father had strong opinions about certain things and he felt a V8 engine was simply necessary in such a big American car.

Never mind that the new 239 cubic inch Y-block V8 had all of 130 hp. And teamed up with the Ford-O-matic transmission, it trundled from 0-60 in 16.2 seconds. And that’s with forcing it into a first gear start; it normally started in second. But nevertheless, it was a V8, and a Ford at that, a brand name which still had a certain cache with Europeans, thanks to ol’ Henry’s reputation for quality and pioneering the first low-cost V8.

My father bit, and we drove home in the big blue whale.

And soon we were off into the Eastern Iowa countryside to explore and find places to hike. That was easier said than done, as the options back then were very limited. Hiking trails? They just didn’t exist, except maybe one or two at the Palisades-Kepler state park. Or we’d just ramble along the shores of the Mississippi, making our own trail. Sometimes my father would just drive out a few miles into the farmlands, park the Ford on the shoulder of a gravel country road and make us get out and start walking. This inevitably caused every local farmer driving by to stop and ask if we were broken down. They just couldn’t conceive of anyone purposely parking and walking out there. It was quite embarrassing.

 

My father had gotten his driver’s license in Vienna in 1940, after he returned from his first stint with the Wehrmacht in the 1939 Polish invasion with some cash in his pocket; it was (and still is) much more expensive to get a license in most European countries. He never used it there, but it did mean that he had no trouble passing his driver’s license exam in the Iowa, such as it was. It was a bit more challenging for my mother; I don’t think she got her license until a year or so after we moved to Iowa. Learning English was a serious struggle for her. Ironically she quickly became a much better driver than my father; more relaxed, natural and comfortable behind the wheel, very much unlike my father. All of us siblings have hair-raising stories to share about riding with him.

On very rare occasions when it was brutally could we’d cajole her into giving us a ride to school, which was a mile away. The only question was whether the old Ford resting in the garage would start on such a morning…not always; and off we’d trudge the mile over the frozen snow and ice.  Sometimes a neighbor whose car did start and was heading to school too would stop and we’d pile in. I remember about eight or more of us packed in a ’60 Lark.

 

The Ford’s highest calling came our first full summer (1961) in Iowa, when it hauled us some 800 miles across the prairies and plains of Iowa, Nebraska and Eastern Colorado and up into the Rockies. It was our first long distance road trip, for better or for worse. One of the better parts was eating at roadside cafes; we never ate out at home. Hamburgers, French fries and a milk shake, please! And pie a la mode for desert, please!

That first trip to Colorado was of course well before I-80 was finished; in fact there were only a few short stretches of it then. Summer traffic on the two lane highways 6 or 30 could be pretty heavy, and the big trucks that lumbered along at 45 or so would create backups. Passing was not one of my father’s fortes; lots of tension, which became contagious in the Ford.

And his built-up tension was on full display in our first night in a motel, in this very Tower Motel in Holdridge, Nebraska. In fact our “suite”, a large room with multiple beds, was directly under the tower. Us kids were a bit worked up and he expected us to all be dead quiet and asleep by like nine. That didn’t work out very well and he lost his top, once again. Why else would I have such a vivid memory of it; I can still see the inside of that room and hear him yelling.

But there were compensations, such as stopping at our first Indian curio shop along the highway. In my overly-vivid imagination, we were really heading into the Wild West. The countryside changed from green fields to brown plains and bluffs. And the air became noticably drier and smelled differently, especially as we crossed into Eastern Colorado.

Somewhere in the rolling plains of Eastern Colorado my father told us that the first one of us in the car that could see the Rockies in the distance would get a quarter. It was my older brother, naturally, who spotted the tiniest speck of a white peak (14,259′ Longs Peak undoubtedly) on the horizon. Amazingly, we were still close to 100 miles away, and it still took us a couple of hours before we started our ascent up the spectacular Big Thompson Canyon towards Estes Park.

Our destination was a splendid old cabin (“Skyline”) in walking distance from the boundary of the Rocky Mountain National Park, above the YMCA camp. It and a second one belonged to a doctor at the university, another avid hiker. And we were lucky to be able to rent it for two glorious weeks every summer until we moved to Baltimore in 1965. But I’ve been back to visit them a few times since then, although the last time Skyline had been torn down for a new modern house.

There was a defunct Simca Aronde parked under the pine tree on the right; I spent many happy hours behind its white steering wheel driving all over Colorado in it.

I could prattle on all day about how beautiful it was up in the Rockies there, and how much I loved our daily hikes and mountain climbs. And how relatively relaxed my father was. My happiest childhood memories are from our times there. This picture was taken on our last year there in 1965, shortly before we moved to Maryland. My sister, who was just turning 18, decided at the last minute that she was not coming along; she soon ended up in Alaska where she still lives. Hers was the first early and unexpected exits from the family made by us three older siblings. Maybe if we’d just moved to the mountains of Colorado my father might have been mellow all the time?

Actually, he did receive an offer from the University of Colorado that very year, but he didn’t take it. We were all so bummed! But I’m not sure it would have made a real difference in him. It just took another 15 to 20 years for him to mellow out. By that time we were mostly long gone.

 

Our hikes to the various Alpine lakes in the Rocky Mt. NP were all stunning, but nothing turned me on more than summiting the peaks of the Front Range. That first year, age eight, I only got as far as Flattop Mt. on the right, but in later years we’d cross over the whole range of peaks to Taylor Peak, barely visible on the far left, and then glissade down Otis Glacier. That was a peak experience (and a long day’s hike).

Of course it was 14, 259′ Longs Peak, the most challenging and compelling of Colorado’s many fourteeners that caught our attention and imagination. It’s a long climb, and its formidable East Face is a sheer wall, for serious technical climbers only. My father went up in 1963 with one of the sons of the folks who owned the cabins.

I finally climbed it in 1970, and it was one of the high points of my life, literally and otherwise. I need to do it again…

The old Ford did some serious climbing that first year too, chugging up the famous Trail Ridge Road, up to its peak height of 12,183 feet. My mother’s commentary: Where are the houses, the cows and barns? In the Alps, people actually live high in the mountains and one can almost always hear the bells on the cows; not here. But we did see a cougar on another outing; no such thing in the Alps.

The Ford did let us down a bit on that trip; after we got into it on this view point, it refused to start. Vapor lock, thanks to the engine being hot from the long drive up and the high altitude, which caused the fuel to boil. Someone told my father about that and so we just sat up there some more and enjoyed the view while we waited for it to cool off with the hood open.  I don’t remember any other breakdowns. My father was pretty diligent in getting it serviced regularly.

The Ford also enabled another very important new part of my life, spending several weeks each summer with a Mennonite family. I have a whole chapter coming up on that, but these experiences were very formative for me, as it exposed me to a very different way of living. My father was of course very cerebral and utterly incapable of fixing anything or such; if anything broke or needed attention, my mother did it. But at the Yoders, everything was utterly different, operating machinery and fixing it, which was an all-too common situation given that all the machinery was vintage. It cultivated an intrinsic interest in making and fixing things, and most of all, driving machinery. I started driving the tractors in the field at age nine. I also developed an appreciation for the spiritual values they cultivated through their deep religiosity.

The Ford may have been a bit dumpy by 1961, but then that was also a virtue. Although I may have been obsessed at the time with the longer, wider, lower look of the new cars in 1961, the tall Ford afforded the six of us more comfort than its lower and more compact 1962 Fairlane replacement. And it would sui t me much better today.

The seats were tall and upright; us kids in the back seat felt a lot less cramped than we would in the Fairlane. But then we were growing quickly too. Should have gotten a big Pontiac wagon!

The instrument panel in the ’54 was new that year, with a curved translucent plastic panel in the front of the speedometer. That was maybe the one cool thing about it? And no, ours did not have a radio.

But it did have the the Borg-Warner 3-speed Ford-O-Matic automatic transmission. In normal use it was really a two-speed unit, as it started in second unless Low range was selected. My father only did that one rare occasions, such as climbing the very steep and rough long “driveway” up to the cabin and on long mountain downgrades to save the brakes. But in Iowa? Never.

Also, our Ford had power steering, which my father was not a fan of. Not enough road feel! The ’62 Fairlane would be devoid of that quite unnecessary device, as would all of his next three future commuter cars, Opel Kadett, 1968 Dart and 1978 Zephyr. And they all had manual transmissions; I’m not sure whether he would have preferred a manual on the ’54 Ford or was thinking of my mother having to learn to drive rather late in her life. Actually, she eventually did learn to drive a stick and was also better at it than my dad.

My parents sat in the front and in between them my younger brother sat in a typical kiddie seat of the times just like this one, with a steering wheel, of course. I was slightly jealous, for not getting to sit in front and for not having a steering wheel.

Seeing the trunk reminds my of my mother working like a dog to do all the packing for all of us (including for my father) and loading the trunk while he studied the maps or read the paper or something. This was their typical division of labor. She also had to bring some kitchen utensils and some basic food stuffs. She made it all happen.

Seeing that spare tire reminds me that we did have a flat on an outing to eat in the Amana Colonies. But fortunately there was a gas station right next to the restaurant and a guy came over and changed the tire. I do not want to imagine my father jacking up a car and doing that.

I admit to being proud that our Ford had that V8 emblem on the hood, even though it was a rather modest V8. The 115 hp 223 cubic inch ohv valve six would have gotten us everywhere just as well, as my father was not one to ever floor a gas pedal. That would be hard on the engine, Paul! 

It’s time to say goodbye to this nigh-near perfect doppelganger to our ’54 Ford. This is a very sweet car, with only 53, 603 miles on it. If I had a large barn to store it in I’d be tempted, specially as it is a manual. Its rear end is my favorite view of it; it has a very nice booty. And it’s given me the impetus to indulge in more than a bit of nostalgia. Thanks for riding along.