Published: October 01, 2008 11:55 pm      

Model T celebrates 100th birthday

When I was a kid, my dad and I never missed a car show sponsored by the Illiana Antique Automobile Club.

Looking at old cars was our favorite thing, except for fishing for bluegills, shooting bottles and cans with a .22 ri-fle, barbecuing spare ribs and going to gun shows.

Dad loved cars, especially big, fancy cars, so he always was drawn to the gleaming old Cadillacs, Packards, Lincolns and Buicks.

I, on the other hand, was a little kid with simple tastes. Those 10-ton dinosaurs meant nothing to me. I gravitated instead to the little black Model T roadster. It was really old, and antique looking, but so petite that I could imagine myself driving one. It had skinny little tires, a little wooden steering wheel, brass headlights, and a fold-down top that appeared to be made of black oil cloth. I even liked its odd nickname: Tin Lizzy.

I’ve never owned a Model T Ford, but I’ve seen hundreds of them and they still intrigue me. There has never been another car quite like it.

Production began exactly 100 years ago this week — on Oct. 1, 1908, in Detroit — and 15 million were made by 1927, when the last one rolled off the line. It remained essentially unchanged all that time. Most years, more Model Ts were produced than all other American makes combined.

It was the first cheap, mass-produced automobile. Although mechanically eccentric, it was tough, dependable, simple and easy to fix.

The Model T once sold for as little as $240, new. Two generations of Americans learned how to drive behind its wheel. At its peak, in 1921, 57 percent of all the cars produced in the entire world were T’s.

The Model T put the world on wheels, and it changed the United States in ways Henry Ford could never have foreseen. It filled city streets and country roads with automobiles. It spawned suburbia. It put gas stations and garages on every corner. It ended the isolation of the farm, and it put the horse and the blacksmith to pasture forever.

Farmers used the T to haul anything and everything;

pump water, generate electricity, thresh grain, pull stumps, saw logs and power all sorts of belt-driven equipment. "The Ford" as it was often called,

helped kill the general store and the one-room schoolhouse; it let people drive into town to shop, and its easy conversion into a school bus led to consolidated schools.

Used Model Ts could be purchased for $25 and often much less. They gave young people freedom, mobility and privacy that earlier generations never had. The car changed American morals in a really profound way.

The Ford, the flivver, the Tin Lizzy spawned a world of corny jokes, poems and wisecracks, too. Here are a few from a delightful old book by Floyd Clymer, titled "Henry’s Wonderful Model T."

"After all, the Ford is the best family car. It has a tank for Father, a hood for Mother and a rattle for Baby."

"A little boy watching a man cranking his Ford asked, ‘Why don’t she play, Mister?’"

Here’s a poem called "Look and Listen."

"It has been said that money talks,

And as I look abroad

Cash says with unanimity,

‘You’d better buy a Ford." Thus popularity proclaims

A nation’s happy choice,

There’s no disguising auto names —

"A Ford!" shouts money’s choice."

Happy 100th Birthday, Model T! You’re an American original, a mechanical wonder,

an engineering marvel ... and still my favorite antique car.

Danville native Kevin Cullen is a former Commercial-News reporter. Reach him at irishhiker@aol.com.