It was right after Labor Day in 1985 when I moved into my Freshman dorm at engineering school. And there it was: this beautiful 1963 Thunderbird. I figured it belonged to some wealthy student’s dad and would be gone shortly. But instead, it stayed, day after day.
Turns out that the Dean of Students, who lived with his family in an apartment in our dormitory, owned it and drove it regularly. And he usually parked it in a space directly across from my second-floor room’s windows. It was the perfect view!
Just FYI, Jim: That’s a ’63 T-Bird. They had that body line along the mid-section and squared off front wheelwells.
I’ve fixed it now.
I thought right away that it was actually a 62 or 63 when I saw the three chrome slashes on the door.
Never noticed that front wheel well was changed for 63. Guess that was necessary to work with the crease/body line.
GF had one in college. Lots of trouble for her. Brakes always had problems. Of course fuel economy was horrid. She was plenty nice though!
One of my math Prof’s had 64 or 65 Riviera GS (dual carbs). He said he filled it up, floored it for a block and then refilled. It took a gallon of gas to refill. While I doubt that he actually used a gallon, I am sure that it probably got 10 to 12 MPG at best in daily driving, and 13 on the highway would be good at higher speeds (around 75).
D’oh! Careless on my part.
Very cool. My first year window view was the Ambassador Bridge, with wall to wall Semi trucks.
I don’t know what the Dean drove, but one of my Profs had an Aerostar with a 5-speed, which is interesting but considerably less cool.
funny ‘cuz my first year window view also was the Ambassador Bridge. I had an 82 grand prix. Beats me what anybody else drove. Nothing special.
Not a fan of the Landau Bar on the C pillar. The long winged thunderbird emblem was a more attractive adornment for the wide blind-spot on later T-birds. It also to me clashed with the bullet motif in the rest of the car. It still is a great car to stare at.
I am with you. The 61-62 are the most attractive of this series. The 63 got several changes, none of them attractive.
I agree, the non-Landau models with the emblem were more attractive and consistent with the jet age theme. But the exclusivity of the Landau had its own attractions. I also thought the final year of the Flair Birds brought changes, especially in the grille, that made it the least attractive of the three iterations of that car. At least the 63 had an attractive (for me, anyway) grille and taillight inserts. The side hash marks – not so much.
This promo combines the Sports Roadster’s Kelsey-Hayes wire wheels with the coupe’s traditional C-pillar trim. Too bad you had to give up fender skirts for the wheels as I never thought these cars looked complete without them.
I have the exact same promo model, still in pretty good shape all these years later. Wish I had had the foresight to keep the box, though. I think we’ve noted before, I would regularly send in for these free promos from the annual new car edition of the Ford Times. Imagine that today. I still have, in addition to the Thunderbird, a ’64 1/2 Mustang, a ’65 Mercury Park Lane, and later, a ’69 Maverick. BTW, you might be interested to know, my brother recently gave me for my birthday a ’65 Lincoln Continental promo, all black, just like my parents had. It’s a stunner, mint condition, even the hood ornament is still there. He regularly prowls the internet, he found it at a website called Wheat’s Nostalgia in Pittsburgh, http://www.wheatsnostalgia.com. They have all kinds of interesting old promos, check it out.
When I was in university (1994-99), one of my physics profs occasionally drove his 1970 ‘Cuda to school and parked it in the same lot that I parked in. It had a 340, a 4-speed stick with the pistol grip shifter and the “tuff wheel” steering wheel. It also did not have power steering or brakes. He factory-ordered it shortly after immigrating to Canada and only drove it through one winter while saving-up to buy a beater.
A nice view out your dorm window to be sure! I guess it gave you something interesting to look at when you didn’t feel like studying… When I moved into my freshman dorm in 1998, I don’t recall seeing anything too interesting in the parking lot the very first day, but within the first week I saw a ’71 Coupe Deville pull into the parking lot, and then an attractive girl got out. My immediate thought was “Good looking *and* drives a classic Caddy? I have to meet her!”
I eventually did–turns out she was a friend of a friend. And while we never dated, I did get to ride in the CDV a few times. Cool old car. Ah, college days…
Nice shot oif a nice car.
I looked out over the roof of the new Coventry Cathedral – quite a view
Good thing it wasn’t outside of my dorm room window, or I would have gotten mighty little studying done. 🙂 As it was, there was a handful of pushbutton Mopars in my dorm parking lot. In addition to my 59 Fury, another guy on my floor had a 61 or 62 Dodge Lancer, and a girl I never met had a baby blue 60 Fury. This was in 1978-9, so they were fairly old cars then. But not as old as the rusty 47 Dodge sedan that my statistics prof drove.
I read somewhere that Ford was thinking of marketing a four door T Bird for the `61 model year. It would have been a Bullet Bird in a hardtop configuration without a center post and conventional opening doors.Inside would feature a split bench front seat, thus making it a true five or six seater.A few full size clays were made, but Ford decieded to cancel it when the `61 Continental was “locked up.’Ford execs thought it would hurt Lincoln sales, something that Lincoln needed after their `58-60 models did not exactly sell like they were supposed to. Intriuging concept, but,of course it had to wait until `67.Probably better that way.
My recollection is that the 61 Lincoln Continental was based on a design originally targeted as the new Thunderbird for that year but shifted over to Lincoln Division and eventually released as the L-C.
That story is often repeated but the ’61 Continental is clearly very much a very modernized adaptation of the Mark II, only in four door form. The Thunderbird has some ideas in common with the Continental , but mainly follows Ford and Thunderbird themes.
The ’61 Continental was based on an original proposal for the ’61 T’Bird. MacNamera was seriously considering killing the Lincoln brand after 1960.The slab sided T-Bird proposal was stretched to accommodate rear doors and the round taillights were replaced with units with a shape similar to the ’56-’57 Mark II.
Front View
If a 4-door Bullet-bird was actually made, I think it would’ve still been a 4-place car. The transmission tunnel would’ve been too large to allow someone to sit in the middle, front or rear. That’s why the T-bird had a full-length console with four bucket seats. If I remember correctly, for 1967 the T-bird switched from unibody to BOF and the transmission tunnel was reduced in size.
As CA Guy said, the ’61 Lincoln design actually came second place in a competition to design the ’61 T-bird. They stretched it to four doors to make the Lincoln, so perhaps that’s what you’re thinking of.
The Landau bar was part of the Landau option:
(from autocolllectorsgarage)
On February 7th 1963 Ford introduced a special Limited Edition Thunderbird Landau called the “Principality of Monaco”. Only 2000 of these cars were produced, each individually numbered 1 through 2000. The cars came in Corinthian White and had a vinyl top in a maroon color called Rose Beige. This color combination was never offered on any other Thunderbird model. The interior was white leather with a white steering wheel and simulated rosewood trim. Each car was fitted with a set of Kelsey-Hayes chromed spoke wire wheels. On the dashboard of each car was a special gold-toned nameplate with the car’s special serial number.
According to Wikipedia, there were an additional 12,193 regular Landau models produced for 63. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Monaco edition on the street, only at car shows. Whereas the regular Landau, the Dean’s car as shown, was the second largest production of the four models that year.
The interior of the Monaco edition is awesome. But, fake wood, huh?
Nice pic.
That faraway shot, reminds me of the scene of the white T-Bird on the highway, driven by Suzanne Somers… Seen by Richard Dreyfus, as he leaves on the plane for Vietnam, in American Graffiti.
I know, I know, different vintage of T-Bird, and that one was all white,… but you get the idea. 😉
I like the grainy, dream-like quality of the photo. This car was 22 years old at the time. It’s hard to imagine a 1993 Thunderbird generating that kind of excitement in a college dorm parking lot in 2015.
+1. That grain makes this image very dream-like. Nice one Jim.
Well, the styling is too blending for that year, but it’s easier to use a Mark VIII instead.
I recently bought a 94 Mark VIII, it’s 21 years old. My first restored car was a 64 Falcon Sprint in 1987, it was 23 years old. I remember seeing a 41 Ford in 1974 thinking it was really OLD! Cars last a lot longer now, a 90s car isn’t that rare relatively.
There are a lot of great cars from the 80s and 90s, they are nearing collectable status.
Nice Mark VIII! Reminds me of the one I used to have–same color and same wheel design, though I had the light graphite interior. I still miss that car…
Thanks — I took this with a crappy 110 camera I owned then. I hated the grainy images it returned back then, but today it seems appropriate, like a look back in time through the haze.
My roommate in college had a 64 T bird Landau. Being more familiar with the regular flair birds, I found the trim differences in the Landaus interesting, but preferred the steel top and stainless dash trim to the Landau’s rubber top and wood grain dash trim. Still, I wouldn’t kick a bullet or flair ‘bird out of my garage just for being a Landau.
I went to a small engineering college in the late seventies, but the dean there didn’t drive anything snazzy like a T-bird. He drove a ’61 Chevy Suburban, light blue with some white accents on the top. He drove it day in and day out until, I believe, the fall of ’79, when he traded it in on a brand new full-sized Dodge passenger van. The van was solid blue, but there were no two-tone accents like on his previous ride.
One of his colleagues did drive an orange MG Midget, which some of the students picked up one time and moved out of the parking lot and out of sight, before the car’s owner left school for the day.
The oldest car in the faculty parking lot of the science building where I attended college in the early 70s was a 1955 or ’56 Pontiac — owned by the Dean of Arts and Sciences! My freshman math prof had a ’57 Olds, and we students used to laugh at that car.
Now a T-Bird like that ’63 Landau would have been a sight to behold!
The ’62-’63 T-Birds are my absolute favorites for the Thunderbirds. In retrospect, 1963 was an absolute banner year for great cars-the T-Bird, the Avanti and the Pontiac Gran Prix, and the Corvette Stingray.
All I remember about my dad’s ’63 T-Bird was the hood being up and steaming coolant hissing. It was an ok car the first winter, but as soon as it got warm out, it did exactly the same thing as the previous ’61 T-Bird did, overheat and eventually blow head gaskets. Around the year mark, my dad finally cracked and the ‘Bird disappeared, replaced by a ’65 Caddy that my mother wound up driving for over three years, a long time in our house, where cars they liked only stuck around 2 years, and cars they hated were gone in less than a year. He gave Ford one last chance though, in ’69, he bought a Lincoln MkIII. He hated it so much he traded it for a ’69 Caddy his brother had bought the same day. He kept the Caddy until 1973, when he ran it into a telephone pole and knocked out the power to most of the south end of Toledo. It was the last car he drove. I’m sure the problems he had with Ford cars is part of the reason I’ve never wanted to buy anything they made, but their 40 year styling twilight zone didn’t help.
Just recalled we had a few deans with interesting automotive tastes also. The Dean of Management daily drove an SUV of some sort, but he also occasionally rode his motorcycle–a Boss Hoss. That’s a custom cruiser bike powered by a Chevy 350. Not what you’d expect to see in that parking lot.. And, from when I started there until I moved away in 2012, the Dean of Design owned a bright red Mustang GT convertible. Aero fox, probably late 80’s. By 2012 that one was entering classic territory.