Date Added - 09/02/2006
This car was sitting new in the showroom window of Gaudin Motors Company a Ford
dealership in Las Vegas, Nevada. Which incidentally is still there. On the night of August the
21st 1957 at 9.51 PM it was bought by a couple from Texas on vacation, they had both been
walking past the showroom when the woman turned to her husband and said, “ that’s the car
for me, I would like that for my birthday! ” So they went in and the husband purchased it for
her. Two years later he now being the owner of a large food processing plant in Texas, she
decided she wanted to upgrade from the T-Bird to a Mercedes Benz, so he bought her a
Mercedes, three weeks later she left him ( planned or what! )
Every time he walked into the garage he said that the sight of the T-Bird really got under his
craw so he put it in the drive-way of his house with a “ For Sale “ sign on it. A couple from
New York on vacation happened to drive by and they bought it. It had only 4,203 miles on the
odometer. The gentleman from NY drove the car home with the hardtop on, upon arrival he
removed it, took out the port holes, pushed a round wooden pole through it and hung it on the
garage wall, this was in 1959.
I purchased the car in 2001 and I lifted the hardtop off the garage wall where it had sat
wrapped all those years. It was just like brand new. The late owner had looked after the car
as you would a baby, though it wasn’t a ‘trailer Queen ‘ car, it could have passed as one,
everything was detailed, and all original, except the stainless steel exhaust and the Kelsey
Hayes wire wheels. The odometer read 65,335 miles. I am assured by his wife he never took it
out if it looked like it might rain, but he did drive it to many local shows.
The only things I have done to the car was to have the original paint ( which had crazed )
taken off to bare metal, the body shop didn’t have to do any body repair or rust repair
anywhere, there were no dents or filler, the car was never hit. I had the body shop do four
primer coats, two base color and six clear coats 12 coats total and every one sanded down. It
now looks like a sheet of glass. I took out the original radio and fitted a modern Thunderbird
AM/FM, Cassette & CD player, WWW radial tires with radial shocks. The white soft top was
in good shape but being Vinyl it had after all those years changed to a creamy color. I
replaced it with a Hartz stayfast black top.
There are two unique things about this car in that the gearshift knob, window crank knobs,
seat adjuster knob, signal lever end knob, and the seal around the dashboard where it curves
over the steering column are all white. All other ‘birds I have seen are black. The original
owner in Texas said that this is how it was in the showroom , so by his words this was factory.
I have the original invoice. The other uniqueness is that there is a plaque on the firewall
commemorating the fact that the ‘ Beach Boys, “Frankie Valli,” and the “ Temptations ” all
singly rode in the car when taken to the stage in Buffalo, NY for a concert they were giving in
1989 and 1990.
In the 2003 car show season it won 64 first place trophies. The car will never be for sale as
this was a ‘ dream ‘ of mine to own one one day, the problem in saving up for a good one the
price would always be out of my reach, but one day I managed to catch up with the current
price....................Dr. John
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