50th Anniversary Mustang 'Card' Set

This is a set of what was promoted as 'cards' and were given away at the recent 50th Anniversary Ford Mustang Celebrations in Las Vegas and Charlotte. I hope to be able to attend the third and final of these gathering which will be held in Lincoln later this summer. We'll see. My travel budget has been hit really hard in the last year or so.

I put the quotes around cards because when I received my set it turned out they are printed on 8x10 heavy stock. I had sort of expected them to be 3x5 or 4x6. But they are pretty sharp nonetheless. There are eight in the set and each of them depicts one generation of the Mustang. I have a new Mustang and it's my first but that doesn't mean I haven't always had my sights on owning one. The long term prospects of putting three kids through college tends to change one's priorities. But now that that's done I was able to scratch that itch.

Each card has the 'flagship' of that generation's Pony with some of it's variants shown along the bottom. The reverse of each has a fact and spec format. The first Mustang, the 1964 1/2, had it's debut at the New York World's Fair which I visited several times. I found a picture of the Ford Pavilion that shows a red Mustang Fastback but I have always remembered a pale blue car there. Oh, the tricks of memories.

Here are a few more of the cards:

1970 Boss 302.......

When I first met my wife in 1975 her older brother had this exact car. She had his hand-me-down gold Camaro which was fun to drive but I always wished I could have taken that 'Stang for a spin.

1994 GT....

I came close to buying a Mustang twice previously. In about 1983 a friend of mine went to work selling Fords and I almost bit on a 'Fox body' sometime soon after that. Then again after I had been working for the school district for a decade, in the mid '90s, I really craved a GT like the yellow one in the card above. My wife, being the voice of reason that she is, put a stop to that. We had three pre-teen kids and a Mustang wasn't practical (nor was another car note).

2012 Boss 302.....

This is the generation of Mustang that's in my garage right now, the S197. Mine is all black, tinted dark and with 'blacked out' lights and side markers. A friend says it looks like a DEA vehicle. Whatever, it's fun to drive.

Finally, here is the as yet unavailable 2015. It's supposedly better looking in person than in pictures (so says Motor Trend) but I'll have to see that for myself. I don't care much for the look of the front end. But I'm a Mustang guy so I'm reserving judgement.

A final note... I first received a poster instead of this set of cards as I had requested. It's a cool poster, 50 different Ponies, but I have no place to display it. Took a phone call to get me this set.

eBay is a funny place

(Alternate title: "Just what I need, another thing to collect")

On a whim I traded in my Ford Fusion last week while on Spring Break. Great car but I had put 75,000 miles on it in just under four years and I wanted to get something out of it before it depreciated to zip. I bought a Mustang. I had begun by looking at Fusions and the Taurus and ended up with this:

I figured "what better car to buy on Spring Break than a Mustang?" My wife's reaction was somewhere near the middle of this scale: 'annoyed' <-------> 'bemused' (married guys will know what I mean) but she's on board now finally decided not to kill me (I'll let her drive it....once). Anyway while visiting the showroom of the place I bought it I was struck by the fact that the dealer didn't have a table full of new car brochures. I have the brochure for every new car I've ever owned. The sales guy said he knew other dealers had them but they didn't see the benefit of giving them out.

So the other day on a whim I ran a Google search on "2014 Mustang brochure" and among the first listings I found this:

Someone was asking $3 for an electronic version of the '14 brochure. I figured I'd if there was one available I could find it elsewhere and I did in about 10 seconds. It's available for free from FoMoCo as a PDF. Same thing that guy was selling for three bucks. 

I also found this:

So for only $14 I can have the printed version. One problem. Ford will mail me the damn thing for the asking, for free.

I see my new source of retirement income. Going from showroom to showroom gathering car brochures and selling them to suckers online. What a country.

During my search I found all manner of vintage Mustang brochures, some were really cool. I'm considering picking up a few. You know how I feel about publications. Since the Mustang is celebrating it's 50th anniversary there is no way I could approach this with the idea of having a complete run(!) but adding one from each of the identifiable versions might be a cool thing to do. I need to give this some thought.