Two days before the world launch of the Ford Mustang, one of the most important legends in the automotive universe, a young teacher from Chicago already had hers.
He had gone to a dealership in search of his first car and, without imagining it, he came across Ford’s greatest bet of that time: the sports car that was born to revitalize the company and that from its first days was marked by success.
Gail Wise, a young third-grade teacher from Chicago, was still living with her parents on April 15, 1964. She shared a red and black 1957 Ford with them, but her new job in the city’s suburbs was beginning to take its toll. greater independence to move around. Her mother then lent her the money with which she went out that day in search of her first vehicle.
At the Johnson Ford dealership, Wise asked the salespeople for a convertible. But since there were none in the room, she was taken to see two cars that were covered in the back. They were the first Mustangs that had arrived at the agency to be sold after the official presentation, planned for April 17 at the New York International Motor Show.
It was love at first sight for Wise with one of those hidden Mustangs: the light blue convertible (the other was a hardtop coupe). He bought it immediately in exchange for $3,447 and took it to his house with a prior warning: he had to drive it at low speed and not operate the top. An eternal relationship began.
“I told the salesman I wanted a convertible, but he didn’t have one on the main floor and he took me to a back room where there were two Mustangs. One was a hardtop and he didn’t even bother to show it to me: he knew the convertible was for me. “, the owner of the historic Mustang told the Detroit Free Press in an interview.
Ford had begun working on the Mustang in the early 1960s with the aim of repositioning itself in the face of the advance of European models and the precipitous drop in sales of its Thunderbid model. The person responsible for carrying out the project was Lee Iacocca, then vice president of Ford Motor Company, who interpreted that need and asked the design team to work on a compact, seductive and sporty vehicle concept.
The impact the company was looking for was exactly what that first Mustang generated in the Chicago teacher. “It was all top secret and this was two days before the launch, but they still sold me the Mustang. I remember driving out of the showroom while everyone was asking me to slow down. People were very happy and gave me their approval for the purchase , even the police. I wanted to keep driving, but my house was only five kilometers from the dealership,” Wise later recalled.
Wise married her boyfriend Tom Brown, an electrical engineer who served in the US Navy, two years later, and they started a family. The seductive sports car then became the vehicle with which they transported her four children for years. Until one day it stopped working and was confined for 27 years in a garage.
At that time, the teacher considered putting it up for sale, but her husband prevented her from doing so: “When I retire, I’m going to restore it,” he told her. So it was. She retired and began tracking down original parts until in 2013 she managed to complete a comprehensive restoration of the first Mustang.
During that restoration process, while searching for parts on the Internet, Wise’s husband discovered that another user claimed to have bought the first Mustang, but on April 16. His wife Gail had indeed acquired it the day before.
Given this, the owners of the historic Mustang went to Hagerty Classic Insurance, an expert firm in collector cars, to verify that they were the true owners of the first Mustang that was sold in history.
The other owner with whom the couple disputed the privileged possession of the first Mustang was a certain Stanley Tucker, a pilot for Eastern Provincial Airlines, who on April 16 fell in love, like Wise, but hours later, with a convertible. target in St. Johns (Newfoundland), 3,500 kilometers from Detroit.
That was unit 001, a pre-production one of the 180 that Ford had manufactured at its Rouge factory in Dearborn, to familiarize workers with the process of the new model. Even so, Tucker had managed to obtain that vehicle, also before the official launch on April 17, 1964.
But that is another story. Wise’s, the official one about the first Mustang marketed in the world, continues to this day. With more than one hundred thousand kilometers traveled, the first pony car is still in the possession of the Chicago teacher, as original as the first day after Tom’s meticulous restoration. Gail was seen in recent years aboard the impeccable light blue convertible at various historic Mustang events. An eternal love tailored to a legendary model.
