a love - hate affair
" I bought this in 1980 when I got out of college, and I needed just cheap transportation. I had bought this an auto auction outside Harrisburg, PA for I think about $850; and the car was a purply blue, one side of it was all caved in and spray painted to match with the rest and different colored hubcaps…But it worked — the engine was great, it never let me down. Through the years we put more bondo on it, more putty. For years, we kept it in the garage, wherever we moved, the Mustang came as well. My 3 children played in it, the cats would sleep in it, and it never worked again.
When my sons were 14 and 15, they wanted the Mustang restored. So we did the frame off restoration, fully restored. A couple of years later, one of my sons got into a bad accident with it— fortunately, he was fine, but it totaled the Mustang. So we then bought it back from the insurance company, and did frame off number two. And then this summer, I was rear-ended twice by the same person, and almost totaled. So it’s at Redline Restorations now, you guys have done a super-super job, and this was frame off restoration number three (chuckles)— and hopefully, that’s enough.
Some fun things about this, was when I bought it at this Pennsylvania auto auction, the state of Pennsylvania was there, they notarized everything in 1980 and it was done. But over the years, I tried to find out when the car was made and everything else. Anytime I would send a check with $25 into the group that would find out when was made and everything else, they would always send the check back and said they could not find it. Years later when you could do it yourself on the computer, it never made any sense. So on a frame-off two, I was telling the group that did that, look for another VIN number — and finally one day they found one. They put that in the computer, and up it came. So then I called Pennsylvania where I bought it from, and gave them this other VIN number and they told me was that it was a stolen 1969 Fastback Mustang, about two weeks before I bought it. And well, I said I had it. They said that if you can get this corrected, it would be the oldest solved cold case of a stolen car in Pennsylvania, it would set a record. But it was stolen in New Jersey, so I called New Jersey, they said the same thing. I then found out who was the insurance company was who had paid the claim. So I bought the car back from the insurance company and then the insurance gave the clear title for the second time and they called New Jersey and Pennsylvania and set the records(straight). So the Mustang has had a lot of fun, it's part of the family, it’s at weddings and at the parties — it's just a fun car. “
- Bob Moore
