![]() My dear father always had a severe issue with drafts, especially around his neck. We literally had to peel ourselves off those seats in the summer, given the short shorts of the era. But in my father’s eye, the cheap seat upholstery was something to be well preserved, so he ordered a set of clear plastic seat covers from Fingerhut, the perfectly smooth ones, not the more expensive ones with raised bumps on them to create channels to drain the rivulets of sweat away. Our Fairlane was utterly stripped of any excess ornamentation, worthy of taxi-cab service. And before I forget, nobody ever rode in the front middle we had to do skin contact he didn’t. Extended skin contact with siblings was not my idea of how to spend two days straight on our vacation trips to Colorado. ![]() The painful reality is that the Fairlane is roughly about the size of today’s Civic or Corolla. In 1962, my sister was fourteen, my older brother twelve, and my younger brother three. Given the fact that we weren’t exactly a touchy-feely sort of family, I definitely had my eye on a wagon with a third seat for a little elbow room. Ford was ahead of the times, and if you wonder where Lee Iacocca got his inspiration for endless variations and different lengths for all the Chrysler K-cars, here it is. That kept me scratching my head back then. And just to confuse matters even more, the Mercury Comet slotted in between the two in length, although it used the narrower width Falcon body. In fact, it would be fair to say that the Fairlane was just a stretched Falcon, the kind of thing done routinely nowadays. And just as the Falcon was the basis for the Mustang in 1964, so it also sired the Fairlane. ![]() Keep in mind, this was just two years after Ford’s smash success with the Falcon. And it was the remarkable success of the Ramblers that undoubtedly inspired Ford to take the lead with the new Fairlane. Sure, Ramblers of the times were essentially mid-sized cars, and perhaps the Studebaker Lark should best be considered one too. Yes, it was a new car, not just factory fresh, but the ’62 Fairlane was a totally new creature from Detroit: the first intermediate-sized car from the Big Three. ![]()
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