DEARBORN, MI – Immortalized in movies and in numerous hot rod publications, the owners of 1932 Fords and other Ford flathead V8-powered vehicles celebrated the car’s 75th anniversary with a multi-day celebration, Aug. 9-12, in the home city of Ford Motor Company.

Participants attended a swap meet at Dearborn’s Hyatt Regency Hotel, visited area museums, participated in a gathering and party outside of Ford World Headquarters on Friday, Aug. 10, and took “hot laps” around Ford’s test track in Dearborn as they saluted the “deuce.”

Organized by the Michigan Hot Rod Association and the Early V8 Club, the celebration of the “Little Deuce Coupe” exceeded expectations, drawing more than 700 people and more than 250 cars to Dearborn, noted K.C. Crain, publisher of AutoWeek magazine, who was one of the members of the organizing committee.  “We put this event on with some great support form Ford. (Ford President and CEO Alan) Mulally was a great supporter,” Crain said.

“I think we’ve had a really good turn out,” added Henry Ford III, the great great grandson of the company’s founder, who stood near Crain. “There are a lot of cars and great people around here.”

The Deuce Coupe, known for its lightweight, and the powerful Ford flathead V8 was the favorite getaway car of Bonnie and Clyde, the Depression era bank robbing team.  They liked its speed and it helped them evade the law while they plied their trade.  It’s purported that Clyde even wrote Henry Ford a letter thanking him for building this fast and affordable V8.

Other outsides were attracted to it starting with the pre-World War II racers who plundered junkyards to find cheap flathead V8’s to beat their rivals while racing on the dry lake beds of Southern California.  Their cars were called “hot rods” and their quest for speed became legendary.   Their racing exploits were tamed and turned into drag racing and its splinter faction, the “show but no go” – the custom car builders. The Beach Boys picked up on the romance of these bad boy rides when they sang about the “Little Deuce Coupe” in the 1960s.  The cars had figured prominently in teenage exploitation films of the fifties and George Lucas, a product of ‘50s California, had to feature a hot rodded ’32 Ford in his film “American Graffiti.”

Touring the lines of parked hot rods and original ’32 Fords or flathead-powered vehicles was Larry Erikson, chief designer on Ford’s Strategic Design staff. He was one of the designers of the critically acclaimed 2005 Ford Mustang.

“From a designer’s point of view, the 1932 Ford has a timeless feel to it,” he said. “The 1932 was only one year. The Model A that was out before it was built for three years, and the ’33 and ’34 Fords that came after were almost built identical (and more streamlined), but the ’32 was such a nice balance of form and shape. It really is a unique car.”

A car that drew praise and some scorn from other Deuce fanatics (who thought its “lines’ were messed up) was the German-built 1932 Ford V8 Convertible by Drauz that had a custom coach body. Overhanging the frame underneath by six inches on each side, the metal-clad wood body with a heavily padded fabric top and ivory knobs on the inside, the car weighs about 550 pounds heavier than a typical 2,450-pound ’32 Ford.

Owned by Ken Tibbott of California, the convertible was built in 1932 at Ford’s then brand-new Cologne, Germany, assembly plant. The car’s powertrain and frame used standard Ford parts supplied from New Jersey, Canada, and England, but everything else on the car, from the firewall back and the frame up, was custom built.     
 
“If you didn’t want an assembly line body, and wanted pearl knobs and places for your liquor, makeup and stuff, you went to the dealer and ordered a custom body,” Tibbott said. “The Germans were willing to spend more money on custom bodies (than many Americans).”

Many custom coach and body builders existed in the early days of the automotive industry, constructing special interiors and bodies for cars. Most of these specialized auto suppliers went bankrupt during the Great Depression, however.

After buying the German Ford in 1973 – the car had been stored at a chicken ranch near Pomona, California, and was in rough shape – it took 20 years for Tibbott to gather the resources and parts to restore the car to enter in the 2003 Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance (CA). Despite the sneering by a few V8 owners, Tibbott’s car has won a number of awards at concours shows including Pebble Beach and Meadow Brook (MI).

If anyone got rowdy at the Deuce celebration, Bob and Rae Taylor of Pennsylvania had the perfect vehicle to haul culprits away – a 1935 Ford V8 paddy wagon/ambulance that had once been owned by the Endicott (NY) Police Department.

“I’ve had it since 1974 when I bought it (for $2,000) with 12,000 actual miles on it; right now it has 25,000 and change,” Bob Taylor said. “And as far as we can determine, it’s the only one of its kind in existence. It was a regular Ford half-ton panel truck that was shipped to a body company in Toledo (OH) where it was cut in two, stretched, and converted into a paddy wagon. The curious thing is that the company didn’t offer a paddy wagon on this chassis until 1938.”

With two extra doors than a normal panel truck, the paddy wagon was equipped with its original Ford flathead engine, transmission, siren, lights, and mostly original paint, except for new lettering. Also, the Taylors installed hydraulic brakes on the vehicle instead of the original (and less reliable) mechanical brakes.

“I was into hotrods when I was 13, into sports cars and drag racing in the 60s,” Taylor said, “but of all the vehicles we’ve owned, this is the most fun vehicle ever.”

Driving around in a classic, blue 1932 Ford Phaeton was Tom Parker and his 8-year-old son, Austin, from Austin, Texas. It was one of four cars on display during the event by Texas collector Rhett Butler.

“Oh, he’s real, and this is one of the cars in his private collection,” Tom Parker said about the car’s owner. “He has about 60 Ford V8s from 1932 to ’34. We have Roadsters, Cabriolets, Victorias, and 11 Phaetons. It’s lots of fun to come out to things like this and see a lot of other gearheads.”

The old 1932 Fords and the flathead V8 engines became legendary with early hot rodders and racers. The cars were lighter that similar General Motors vehicles while the Ford motors were more powerful, noted William “Wild Bill” Davies of Michigan who owns a 1934 Ford flathead-powered car that was modified to become a dirt track racer by the early 1960s.

“I’ve always been fascinated by the Fords,” said Davies who is a retiree from the General Motors Technical Center in Warren (MI). “I grew up read the Little Pages and Hot Rod and the Fords were always the hot rods because the Fisher bodies were heavy and had the wood in them.”

By the 1960s, with the advent of the Chevrolet small block engine, many hot rodders swapped their flatheads for Chevys motors, Davies noted.    
    
“I put a flathead into my car – part of it is for nostalgia reasons… but the problem when you cross the threshold [and install a crate-motor Chevy], you’ve entered a realm of unlimited horsepower,” Davies said. “These cars were not really capable of handling that kind of horsepower.”

Also, Davies runs his car in vintage exhibition races. Of course, his car is greatly modified when compared to a normal ’34 Ford flathead. The engine sits back 15 inches from its original position and down about four inches in order to lower the mass and get closer to a 50/50 weight distribution. The car also has a 1946 Ford ¾-ton pickup truck rear end for a triple six to one gear ratio and reverse casters on the front wheels so, if the driver loses control, it will spin out rather than go straight into a wall.

Hot rodders have a special love for their machines, counting them as family members, such as the 1932 Ford Coupe owned by John Glass who said it was his “oldest boy.” Glass has owned the car since 1967 – a couple years longer than he has known his wife, Bernadette, who isn’t allowed to drive it.

“It didn’t have a motor or transmission when I bought it; it was just the body and the frame,” John Glass said. “This is probably the fifth rendition of it. It’s been a myriad of things.”
    
Heavily modified, the Glass hot rod is equipped with a Ford 337 cubic inch engine, automatic overdrive transmission, a 1978 Mustang II front end and a 1982 Corvette rear end, so it has independent front and rear suspension and four-wheel disk brakes.

“Originally, the car had a four-cylinder engine rather than a V8,” Glass noted. “The rear end comes from a Corvette that I once owned. It had been stolen and the only things left when it was recovered was the rear end, the frame, and the back window.”
    
A “Deuce” of a different sort – the 1954 French-built Ford Comète Monte Carlos that was used by Henry Ford II and owned by members of the Ford Design staff – was displayed during the Ford World Headquarters segment of the multi-day celebration. The car has unique bumpers, trim and wheels when compared to the other 698 special edition Ford of France Comète Monte Carlos models.

“This particular car was unique because when it came into the Design Center in 1964, they put Dayton wire wheels on it right away,” said the owner, H.D. “Buck” Mook, who retired from the Ford Design Center in 1997 after a 30-year career. “Also the bumpers were all modified (they are thinner and more streamlined) than the other 698 French Fords.”

The car design was based on a 1949 prototype designed by Stabilimenti Farina and commissioned by Henry Ford II, who also had received the nickname the “Deuce.” The Comète Monte Carlos became the most expensive Fords built at the time and the only ones with custom bodies.

“You think of cars from the fifties, they had covered wheels and skirts on the back,” Mook said. “The beauty of this is the simplicity of the car, but the American public was going after chrome-laden cars back then.”

Painted a mirror-like dark blue, Mook had started restoring the “Deuce” car in 2002 after having it stored for 25 years. Unable to complete it in time for Ford Motor Co.’s centennial in 2003, he only got it in presentable condition on Aug. 3 in time for the 2007 Meadow Brook Concours d’Elegance in Michigan where it won a “lions award” (a runner up for the top prize in its segment). The car still needs about “a hundred hours more work,” Mook admitted, so the headlights can be hooked up, shocks installed, and tweaks done to the ignition system.

Another crowd pleaser was the aluminum body, Ford V8 flathead-powered car that is designed to look and operate like a pre-World War II racecar that was used on southern California’s dry lakes. Built using 1930s period-correct tools, techniques and materials, Paul Wright of Texas created the car for his wife Kathy Grice to drive.

“I’m fascinated by prewar hot rodding,” Wright said. A native of England, he not only raced vintage-style hotrods but also worked at shop in California for years, restoring on more than 60 vintage rods for others. The racecar uses a ’32 Ford frame, knobby tires to better get traction on dry sandy surfaces, a gas tank in the rear, just behind the driver, and was assembled using rivets and all gas-torch welds, like the techniques used in the 1930s.

His wife was the daughter of Al Grice, a famed southern California mechanic “who was a hot rodder before there were hot rodders,” she said.

Named “El Gato Grande” (the big cat) after Grice’s father’s nickname, the 960 pound car’s Ford V8 flathead produces about 240 horsepower, “so the power to weight ratio on this car is phenomenal,” Wright said. All that is missing from the vehicle is a gear for the magneto so the ignition will work.

Built 75 years ago as America’s economy slid into the depths of the Great Depression, the 1932 Ford V8 has stood the test of time as an automotive icon. It’s not just because the original car was exciting, but also because it was such a malleable form that could be customized, tricked, chopped, and “rodded” by many generations that have followed since.  One has to wonder what car or engine Ford has in the works that will continue to excite the crowds 75 years from now or whether the highly leveraged company will be able to win its race for survival.

Did you enjoy this article? Please bookmark it onto: