Just the tool I need

You know how gardeners spend the winter looking at seed catalogs? Me, I've been thinking about tools.

Not just tools I want. Tools I need.

Because I'm not a longtime car guy, just starting out on a restoration project, my needs are many.

I need a hydraulic floor jack and four sturdy jack stands, so I can work underneath the Mustang. I need an air compressor and an impact wrench, to give me a fighting chance against all those nuts and bolts. I need a sandblaster and cabinet, so I can blow the rust, paint and gunk off old parts as I remove them.

I could go on, but these are tools I need for the warm-weather restoration season ahead.

So what do I do this week? I buy an engine stand.

You're right; an engine stand wasn't on my "need" list. I didn't really even want one.

But Kevin had a spare, and he was selling it. He's a co-worker and Camaro guy who has become a key ally and adviser. He wanted only $35 for it. How could I say no?

You're right again. I couldn't. (The funny thing is, Brenda thinks I lack discipline, when the real issue is that she can't grasp my logic.)

Anyway, now I have this engine stand, which I have to figure out how to assemble. That's the easy part, because next I have to figure out how to get the engine – which weighs, oh, maybe 400 pounds – up onto the stand.

Fortunately, there's a tool for that: an engine lift. Now I need one!

What's in a name?

What we have here is a gentleman named Lee Emford sitting on the wing of a modified, World War II fighter plane called the P-51 Mustang. In the foreground, of course, is another Mustang: Lee's 1967 fastback. (The temperature at the time was pushing 100 degrees; Lee may look comfortable, but he's not. "The wing of the plane was very hot," he said. At least he wasn't wearing shorts.)

Lee wrote me back in February to share the story of his first encounter with a Mustang. It came at lunchtime on April 17, 1964, the very day the Mustang went public. He was 19 at the time, and persuaded five co-workers at his insurance agency to walk to Meyers Ford in Freeport, Illinois, to check the new car out. When they arrived, a dozen or so people were clustered already around a single, white Mustang coupe. With his first glance, Lee fell in love.

"It looked so beautiful," he said. "Like something out of the future."

The Mustang's looks are almost always the first thing people mention when they share their memories with me – and with good reason. But I've come to think that the Mustang's name is the overlooked half of its first-impression magic.

I mean, what if the Mustang were the Cougar instead? It almost was. The Ford designers who sketched and then modeled the Mustang called it the Cougar, and fought hard to keep the name.

Cougar is okay, I suppose – Lincoln-Mercury grabbed the name a few years later. But, while Lee is very fond of cats, it's hard to imagine him posing with a cougar.

How about the Torino? That was the Mustang's name as late as July 1963, according to a collection of ad mockups I found in the J. Walter Thompson agency archive at Duke University. "Only 1,478,000 lire?" one says. "That's how the price tag would read if the new Torino were as Italian as it looks."

Now, the Mustang was designed to evoke a European sports car – the long hood and short deck of an English roadster, the open-mouthed grille of a Ferrari – but the car is an American original. Like Cougar, Torino found itself employed later on another Ford Motor Company vehicle; riding on the Mustang, it would have taken the air right out of the car's tires.

Ford first used the name Mustang on a two-seat, sports-car prototype built in 1962. The man who named that car, John Najjar, was inspired by the fighter plane and the patriotic, triumphant memories it evoked. (Remember, the war in which the Mustang flew had ended only 17 years earlier.)

When the name Mustang was married to the looks of the Cougar/Torino, something special happened. It's embodied in the Mustang badge. The red, white and blue patch strums the chords of World War II memories. And the horse, sculpted at full gallop – a wild horse of the American West – captures perfectly the energy and spirit of that moment in time. It's a moment led by a confident generation, tempered in war, but driven by the sheer numbers of the surging, ascendant, post-war Baby Boomers, a generation of which Lee Emford is part.

By the way, though Lee fell for the Mustang on its very first day, he didn't buy his car until 1993. He has given it a name all its own: the Filly. I am intrigued by how many classic Mustang owners do that – it's as if their car were part of their family – but that's a subject for another day.