Reunited

Drive through the resort town of Clear Lake, Iowa, on a fair day and you might see lifelong resident Bonnie Glidden hit the streets in her catchy maroon 1966 Mustang GT. The performance car packs a V-8 engine and she’ll have the top down, but don’t expect a show of muscle. When Glidden takes the wheel, she’s cruising this town of slightly more than 8,000 with oldies on the radio and a pillow tucked ergonomically behind her back.

She makes the short, slow drive down Main Avenue and turns right at the town’s centerpiece, the glistening 3,864-acre Clear Lake. A breeze sweeps through the car and at a top speed of about 40 mph, Glidden seems to delight in the drive—and for good reason. In 1972, she walked away from her then-tired Mustang, taking $700 on a pragmatic trade-in toward a reliable new Volkswagen Super Beetle. Twenty-five years later, she brought the classic car back home to Clear Lake—and with the fully restored Mustang came something more: a second chance at savoring a long-ago gift.

‘I was the one with the car’”

As she drives, Glidden talks of another era: how the cottages lining the lakeside looked 30 years ago, how her short hair was long in the 1960s, how her father first had eyes for a Mustang in 1965.

“Early on, Dad thought a lot about getting one as a family car. I still remember being disappointed when he came home instead with a ’63 Rambler,” recalls Glidden, 52.

Memories of her father are as much a part of the car as its wood-grained steering wheel and chrome-laden dash. The piece of living history she now drives started as a white-with-black-interior pony, which she drove off a used-car lot in neighboring Mason City in April 1969—thanks to Dad.

“I always loved the car,” Glidden says. But back in 1969, the attraction was immature.

“I took Dad to see it and whined. You know, ‘Oh, it’s so cute. Oh, I’d sure like to have that car.’ He cashed in a life insurance policy, bought it for me, and I drove it home the next day.”

In her college years, the Mustang boasted a bellowing Walker glass-pack muffler. “I remember one spring day running out after class, throwing the top down, and just driving,” she says.

One favorite weekend pastime was “draggin’ Federal” in Mason City. “I drove my friends everywhere. I was the one with the car.”

But something other than the car set Glidden apart from her college friends. After losing her mother to cancer at the age of 17, Glidden came home one day in February 1970 to find her father collapsed in his chair. He’d suffered a fatal heart attack. Only 20, she had lost her second parent, just 10 months after her father bought her the car.

“I never got the chance to get to know my parents as an adult,” she says. “When Mom died, I was saddled with a lot of responsibility. I think Dad was trying to make up for that.”

Now, Glidden’s gift from her father sits in the same garage it did back in the early 1970s. Her father, a local building contractor, built the house when she was just 4, and she’s lived there most of her life.

Today, she and her husband, Bob, call the house home. On a low shelf in the kitchen still sits a basket-shaped crystal bowl filled neatly with papers. It was there that, years ago, Glidden tucked the key to finding the lost Mustang—a small, yellowing “guaranteed warranty” card that bore the car’s vehicle identification number (VIN), 6TO8C198814.

Driving a piece of her past

“Every time I weeded out old papers I just kept putting that card back,” says Glidden. As the years passed, her interest in the memento grew.

“I realized that I’d made a mistake selling that car. I’d look at that card and think, ‘Oh, I wonder if that car is still around. I wonder if it has been restored.’ I’d think, ‘Well, maybe someday.’”

“She’d go through that bowl every year and threaten to see if she could find the car,” Bob says.

In July 1997, she decided to act. In a short letter to Iowa’s Office of Vehicle Services, she noted the Mustang’s VIN and asked for information about the car’s fate. Within days, she had a response, a letter listing the car’s last known Iowa registration in August 1979. It took just seven phone calls and 12 days—including a paper trail that led coincidentally to one owner in Glidden, Iowa—to trace the car to Pavel Auto Sales in O’Neill, Neb., 250 miles away.

Nostalgic searches for lost Mustangs aren’t uncommon, says Bill Johnson, president of the national Mustang Club of America. Though relatively few actually follow through and buy back old cars, the odds that an owner will find his former steed aren’t bad. As many as 40 percent of the 1966 production year’s 607,658 Mustangs may still be on the road or in restorable condition, Johnson estimates.

Glidden’s good fortune at finding hers was tempered with the fact that it wasn’t quite what she’d had in mind. “My heart sank when I first heard about the color,” she says. She also learned that shop owner Izzy Pavel wasn’t ready to sell. “He said he’d plan to sell it at some time in the future, and that he’d keep me in mind,” she explains.

After an eight-month wait, Glidden got the call she wanted—Pavel said he’d part with the car. The price was fair, but “a bit more than my dad paid,” says Glidden in knowing understatement. A 1966 convertible in good shape generally sells for $12,000 to $14,000, Johnson says—and it’s worth more if equipped like Glidden’s.

“Bob drove it back from Nebraska,” says Glidden, who was too excited to make the drive herself. “I was on cloud nine. I don’t know how many pictures I took from our hotel-room balcony on the trip back.”

Back in Clear Lake, Glidden still sometimes fights the car’s tendency to shift stubbornly from first to second gear. And she’s had to get used to driving a car that in bulk and power seems big by today’s compact-car standards.

Her black-and-white sportster had a life of its own in the years away from Clear Lake, barely dodging the trash heap (at one point it sat rusted, without engine and transmission), and then gaining GT status with its new performance engine and posh pony interior. But for all that’s changed, Glidden sees the familiar: the console, a boxy radio that at least looks just like the one that used to play the Beach Boys, a VIN that’s just one digit off (to reflect the new engine). She drives a piece of her past, a fun ride that helps her hold close her father’s generosity, love, and playful spirit.

She knows now that her father took as much joy being in the saddle as she. “He borrowed the Mustang one day and didn’t come back on time. I was mad and went to meet him in the Rambler, and I found him. He was in town with the top down, just smiling. He was proud of that car.”

Even bittersweet memories make Glidden smile. “I remember driving with Dad in the Mustang to hear a former governor of Iowa speak one evening. That was just before he died. We were just starting to relate to each other as adults.”

William R. Walker—Glidden’s kind-faced father, pipe perched on his lips as in a favorite photo—surely would grin today to see his daughter back in the classic car. He’d see her smiling in the Mustang that bears the vanity plate REUNITD, driving down Main, in a local parade, or just commuting to work on a sunny day.

“I’d never sell this car now,” she says. Then she reconsiders: “Maybe if we were starving.” She reconsiders again: “No. Then I’d probably just charge for rides.”

Yvonne Parsons is a freelance writer in Nashville, Tenn.

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