Car which failed enjoys curious resurrection

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32460, 21 November 1970, Page 13

Car which failed enjoys curious resurrection

(Newsweek Feature Service)

If there were a hall of fame for history’s great losers, the Edsel would have to rank among its star attractions. Launched by the Ford Motor Company in 1957 at a development cost of some $250 million, and buoyed by official predictions that it would move at the rate of 250,000 cars a year, the Edsel survived for two years before going down ingloriously as the car industry’s biggest lemon.

“Sales started slowly,” recalls one Edsel owner, "and tapered off.” AH told. Ford sold only 109,466 of the cars and lost $350 million. But now, astonishingly enough, the Edsel is enjoying a curious resurrection a decade after its demise. Much of Edsel’s new appeal is certainly as a collector’s item. Some politicians and other notables have taken to riding in open Edsels in parades, knowing they’re sure attention-getters. And last summer, die boy who caught the first foul ball hit into the stands during the 1000th game played at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles was driven around the field in an Edsel. ■ Still, the car that was once the laughing-stock of motordom is enjoying such unaccustomed success that 1400 owners have banded together to form the Edsel Owners’ Club of America (E.0.C.A.). Its founder and president is Edsel Henry Ford of Oakland, California, a 45-year-old food-service manager who is not related to the car manufacturing family and who bought his first Edsel so people would stop kidding him about not having one. Edsel jokes and stories are passed along among club members like folk legends. Sample: “A cop was going to give me a parking ticket but he saw I had an Edsel and he said, ‘You’ve suffered enough.’ ”

There is even an Edselowner’s "prayer,” which goes: “The Edsel is my car; I shall not want another. It maketh me to lie down in muddy roads to fix it; it leadeth me to the junk yard. It depleteth my wallet; it leadeth me in the path of ridicule for its name sake. Yea, though I ride down the hill, I walk up. I receive no respect, for thou art with me; thy name and big nose embarrass me.” Used-car dealers, who have never been ones to pass up the opportunity to make an easy buck, have responded to the new Edselmania with predictable enthusiasm. A 1958 Lincoln c - be snapped up for about $2OO these days, but a 1958 Edsel in decent condition can fetch up to $l5OO. Two years ago, one Edsel owner was quoted as saying he would not take $5OOO for his car. No-one had offered him anything like $5OOO, of course, but that did not deter him. Today he says he would not take $lO,OOO for it. Edsel fans sometimes like to associate themselves with the fraternity of classic-car owners but, true to form, they lose on almost every count. The cars never had any of the ingredients that go into the making of a classic. They were not expensive (about $3OOO for the most

lavish model). They were considered mechanically and stylistically undistinguished. They did not go out of fashion from old age; they were scorned from the outset The Edsel was a masterpiece only of bad timingcoming on the scene at precisely the time when many Americans’ tastes were turning toward unostentatious compact cars. Still, classic-car men do concede the Edsel a bit of freak value. “It's like a coin collection,” says Raymond W. Washbum, librarian of the Veterans’ Motor Car Club of America in Boston. “If you can find the imperfect coin, it has value, and the Edsel is Henry Ford’s greatest mistake.” But Edselmaniacs tend to cite a higher purpose to their attachment a kind of reflection of America’s age-old affection for losers. “I wouldn’t sell mine,” says David Jenkins, an advertising man with the Chicago firm that handled the original Edsel account “I think there’s a kind of feeling among Edsel owners that it’s like a poor little lost dog that everybody’s been beating up on and I’m going to try to save it” Or, as members of \ the E.O.C.A. like to say, “It used to be that the original fourtime loser was a pregnant spinster driving an Edsel with a Nixon sticker on it Now there’s the pill, Nixon’s President and the Edsel’s a collectors’ item.”