Power

America’s love affair with the automobile may be fading, according to a recent Associated Press story that said driving by U.S. households has declined nearly 10 percent since 2004.

But don’t tell that to local owners of some of the first Ford Mustangs ever produced a half-century ago.

“It’s a BEE-u-tiful car. Just gorgeous. I like the sound of it,” 17-year-old South Eugene High School junior Molly Champion says about the gleaming yellow 1965 convertible Mustang that her late grandfather fully restored and bequeathed to her.

“They’re not for sale, and they never will be,” says Cottage Grove’s Rick Boyce, 61, of his two Mustangs, a 1965 maroon GT Fastback and a fire-engine-red 1965 convertible that enthusiasts actually call a 1964½ to distinguish the originals from a second, slightly modified production wave that came out later in ’65.

“They’re just cute little cars, and I just really like them,” says Eugene’s Ken Vanderbelt, 83, who bought his 1964½ white convertible 13 years ago.

And what does fellow octogenarian Gordon Juve say about the midnight blue beauty he bought at Eugene’s Kendall Ford on Feb. 18, 1965?

“I went by the lot, and they had three Mustangs,” Juve says. “Two Fastbacks and this one. I talked to the salesman, and I said, ‘I want this one.’ And I bought it that night. I drove it home, and the rest is history. Had it ever since.”

Happy anniversary, Ford Mustang.

It was 50 years ago in March when the first of one of the most popular and iconic cars in American history rolled off the production line at the Ford plant in Dearborn, Mich.

A month later, on April 17, 1964, the public got its first glimpse of the vehicle — the first in a class of American automobile known as a “pony car,” an affordable (base price was $2,368), compact yet sport performance-oriented car — at the New York World’s Fair.

Named for the legendary P-51 Mustang fighter plane from World War II and imbued with the style, speed and grace of the horse of the same name that became its logo, it had a long hood, a short rear deck, bucket seats and sharply sculpted flanks.

It was a hit from the get-go. Ford’s Lee Iacocca, the driving force behind getting the car built and marketed, appeared with the Mustang on the cover of both Time and Newsweek magazines that week.

“When we got the clay looking like the car does now, we were so in awe, it was ricocheting throughout the company,” says Jim McBain, 83, of Florence, a 35-year Ford employee who was a clay modeler on the team that designed the car. “No one had ever seen a car that stood out like it … a classic. We knew then that we had captured something that was breathtaking.”

The Register-Guard received many responses to a request looking for owners of some of the original Mustangs. Here are the stories of four of them:

Grandpa’s gift

Kari Champion lost her father, Bobby Vinson, more than a decade ago to cancer when he was only 67. And there’s no doubt the man will be on her mind today, Father’s Day.

He’ll also be on the mind of Molly, John and Kari Champion’s daughter, because it was Grandpa’s 1965 convertible Mustang, that yellow beauty with the black interior, that she inherited when she was only 6 years old. She will be a senior at South Eugene High in the fall.

“I just remember looking at it and it being gorgeous,” Molly says of the first time she saw the car at her grandfather’s shop off Lorane Highway.

Vinson died in 2003. He ran Eugene Service Parts, a wholesale auto parts business in west Eugene from 1976 to 1998, bought the car in the 1990s and spent three years restoring it between 1999 and 2002, Kari Champion says.

It was the fourth car he had restored, after a 1949 Cadillac, a 1967 Corvair and a 1969 Chevrolet Camaro.

Now, if Molly could just get used to driving it. Or, maybe, if her dad would let her.

“No, I drive the Kia,” Molly says, alluding to the little car parked in the south Eugene cul-de-sac where they live. “Dad won’t let me drive (the Mustang) to school.”

Actually, she doesn’t really want to all that much. She’s afraid someone might ding it or that she might get into an accident.

“We’re looking to sell it, actually, for college (tuition money),” Molly says. “We’re looking for someone who might drive it more.”

Her boyfriend, Ben Lonergan, also a South Eugene junior, drove the car and took Molly to the South prom at the Valley River Inn on May 17.

“It was amazing,” Molly says. “It was so much fun. I remember we pulled up on Willamette (Street), and there were these two little old ladies, and they were like, ‘Oh, they’re going to prom.’ ”

The criteria for whomever buys it (it was appraised at about $33,000 four or five years ago) is that they have to drive it, and Molly has to be able to see it being driven around town now and then.

“I really don’t enjoy driving it, because there’s so much of him in it,” she says of her grandfather. “And I don’t want anything to happen to it.”

Blowin’ in the wind

“I’d been looking for one for a long time,” Ken Vanderbelt says of his 1964½ white convertible Mustang.

After looking as far away as Tucson, Ariz., Vanderbelt finally found what he was looking for in March 2001, after he responded to the ad of a fellow Eugene man who worked as a salesman at Brad’s Cottage Grove Chevrolet.

The car had 115,000 miles on it, and Vanderbelt paid $11,050 for it.

“I did quite a bit of work on it,” says Vanderbelt, a retired car salesman.

He has been working on cars since “I was knee-high to a grasshopper.” He was raised in Abiline, Kan., where his father owned a Chrysler Plymouth dealership.

Like Boyce, Vanderbelt has owned lots of cars in his life — about 60, he estimates — many of them back in the late 1940s and early ’50s when he was still in high school.

“The longest I had one? I think about three months,” he says. “The shortest? About two days.”

Vanderbelt’s wife, Doris, enters the den of their northeast Eugene home with a photo of a 1940 Ford he owned when he was 18. The first car he owned, Vanderbelt says, was a 1936 Chevy two-door that he bought when he was 15.

His Mustang has cream-colored bucket seats and red carpeting, power steering, power brakes and a power top that rolls the roof up with the touch of a button. And the car’s original AM radio is still intact.

Vanderbelt starts the car in his driveway and that V-8 makes a sweet, rumbling vrrroooom as it purrs like a lion.

As the car cruises northwest on Game Farm Road, his short, white hair blows in the wind.

“I don’t like my hair blowin’, but I put up with it,” Vanderbelt says after the drive. “I just like convertibles. I’ve had four or five convertibles. It’s just something different. It’s a really neat car.”

He likes to drive it in Coburg’s annual Golden Years parade. “It’s just a fun thing to do, even at my age.”

Vanderbelt isn’t necessarily attached to this car for the rest of his life.

“I think somebody else should enjoy it,” he says. “I might put it up for sale.”

Won’t fade away

Rick Boyce was all of 15 years old in 1968 when his father agreed to split the cost of a “faded red” 1964½ convertible Mustang that was for sale at the Tom Collie dealership in Cottage Grove.

They paid $1,395 for it, he recalls, and his payments were $53.50 a month, which he says he paid off by mowing lawns.

Boyce, who runs Boyce and Sons in Cottage Grove, the building and landscape materials business his father started, insists that the 39,000 or so miles on the convertible’s odometer is the actual mileage. It had about 34,000 miles on it when they bought it, Boyce says, and the car sat in his dad’s shop for years in the 1970s and ’80s, all torn apart and eventually put back together and remodeled with its current fire-engine-red paint job and goldenrod pinstripes.

“At one time, I was going to flare the fenders, and I was going to paint it chartreuse green,” Boyce says, sitting in the kitchen nook of his Cottage Grove home with his longtime partner, Kathy Luckcuck.

“I’m really glad I didn’t. I would have ruined it if I’d flared the fenders.”

He thinks the car’s value is now somewhere in the $35,000 range.

Boyce has owned many cars over the years, about 15 of them Mustangs, he says.

“I think I had 22 or 24 vehicles my senior year (at Cottage Grove High),” Boyce says. “I just bought and sold ’em.”

Boyce’s Mustangs have vanity plates — “Heathe” for his daughter, Heather, on the convertible, and “Brendn” for son Brendan on the GT Fastback. He got the plates when both were children.

“Which was really neat until they turned 16,” Boyce says. “Then they wanted to drive them.”

Boyce remembers that he and his father almost bought another Mustang, also a 1965 but not among the first wave of those produced, on that day almost 46 years ago. The other one had “big tires and pipes,” but Dad said no, Boyce recalls.

“But I’m really glad I got the faded-out red one … ’cause it’s a collector.”

The original owner

Forty-nine years, three months and 28 days is a long time to own a car, but you’ll have to rip Gordon Juve’s 1965 Ford Mustang from his cold, dead fingers. “It’s not for sale,” the 80-year-old retired Bethel School District teacher says matter-of-factly as he gingerly steps into his garage.

He’s 80 percent blind now, so it’s been a few years since Juve has been able to drive his beloved four-speed with the powerful, finely tuned V-8 engine that still sounds like a jet at takeoff when you rev it.

The car is driven mostly by friends and his grandchildren, Juve says, and his will calls for it to go to granddaughter Keila Mintz, 40, of Weiser, Idaho.

Juve was a 30-year-old Shasta Junior High School teacher when he bought the two-door hardtop for about $3,000 at Kendall Ford, when the dealership was at 13th Avenue and Olive Street in downtown Eugene, in February 1965.

And why did he buy it?

“Well … ” Juve says, standing in his Bethel area driveway.

“To impress women,” says his ex-wife and still good friend, Sondra Juve Short, also 80. “And I wasn’t the only one!”

When the Mustang was new, it so impressed Juve Short that she could hardly stand it. Every day, as a first-grade teacher at Clear Lake Elementary School, she’d see that sparkling Mustang parked in front of her classroom windows in the lot that Shasta and Clear Lake teachers shared.

She began leaving playful notes on the car, telling Juve to park it elsewhere because she couldn’t afford one and it was making her drool.

Both were recently divorced, and they fell in love with that blue Mustang as the magnet that brought them together.

“He was quite a catch,” Juve Short says. They were married for 41 years and then divorced, but she still keeps an eye on Juve, who now lives alone.

The car’s odometer reads about 85,000 miles, but it’s most likely been driven 285,000 or 385,000. Juve isn’t sure whether it has rolled over two or three times.

When Juve Short takes it for a spin, with Juve riding shotgun, she laments that she won’t be able to “really rack it up because there isn’t really a safe place out here unless I got out in the country.”

Nonetheless, when she turns west onto Avalon Street, she quickly flips the gearshift into third and lets the 289-cubic-inch V-8 engine roar.

“You like it?” she says, before admitting that she left her driver’s license in her car back at Juve’s house and that she’s not wearing her eyeglasses.

“But I haven’t had any Miller’s yet.”

Miller’s?

“Miller High Life. The champagne of beers.”

The champagne of Fords will have to do.

Follow Mark on Twitter @delmont5 . Email [email protected] .