My Favorite Ride: Memories of a a 1964 Ford Falcon linger after all these years
It was 1979, and LuAnne Holladay was a 20-year-old college student. She saved some cash and set out to purchase a car.
"My first car was a '64 Ford Falcon that I bought for 400 bucks from the man who owned the Texaco station near the A&P in our neighborhood."
She worked two-and-a-half months the summer of 1979 at a hotel in the North Carolina mountains, "squirreling away every tip and paycheck in a passbook savings account, earning enough to buy my own wheels."
Holladay, a Bloomington woman I know as a yoga teacher but who also is an artist and writer, tells the story of this car in a tiny, handmade booked called "Compost Diaries," an eclectic mix of prose, poetry, family stories and insights about decaying vegetable peels and life.
The car was 15 years old when she bought it, a rusting beige. Her stepfather knew a man who would paint it cheap, and Holladay chose a deep burgundy hue.
Even with its $100 paint job, lack of safety belts and advanced age, she cherished the Falcon. Named it Birdie. Drove it 400 miles round-trip, often, from eastern Georgia to her boyfriend's home near Atlanta, with two jugs of water in the backseat in case the radiator overheated. It never did.
Holladay created just 100 copies of the recycled-paper Compost Diaries, so it's unlikely you'll be reading her story on your own. Holladay tells it so well, I am quoting extensively, with her permission, from Chapter 6, titled "Birdie."
"I loved that car, with its three-on-the-tree shift manual transmission, its AM radio and the metal dashboard that got hot as hell in the summer and cold as ice in the winter. I loved its four heavy doors, still sturdy on their hinges, with working hand-cranked windows. Bench seat; no seat belts, of course."
The small and simple engine surprised her. "The first time I popped the hood, I thought I was looking at a large lawnmower." The battery sat on a piece of plywood, "the original metal support having disintegrated sometime in the early '70s, around the time Nixon resigned."
Holladay drove the car just a few years before her parents insisted on buying her a newer, bigger, safer vehicle. One with safety features. They proudly presented her with a Plymouth Fury Salon. I don't think I've ever seen one.
Holladay nearly cried, and not tears of joy, over the white white sedan with its green mottled top.
Holladay didn't let her disappointment show. "I would be protected," she wrote, "by seat belts and an acre of autobody."
Her brother took the Falcon over. Not long after, there was a wreck, "a banal mishap on a rainy night, on a busy road. No one was hurt."
Except her beloved Birdie. The Falcon ended up at the junkyard.
"Foolishly, I gave that car a name, the way some people do. It's dangerous, naming a thing. It attaches you, making the passage of time, the relentless change and rust and loss, more acute."
Have a story to tell about a car or truck? Contact My Favorite Ride reporter Laura Lane at llane@heraldt.com or 812-318-5967.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: 'I gave her a name': Remembering a 1964 Ford Falcon called 'Birdie'
