My Favorite Ride: Driving another Ford 'shoebox' sedan 60 years later

It was many years ago that Wayne Sullivan owned his first “shoebox” Ford, the name given to the company’s 1949-1951 sedans because of their new squared-off design.

It was 1963. Sullivan was 17 and had a dark green 1949 Ford. “It was my first dependable car,” he told me at a recent cruise-in at the Hardees in Bloomington. “Then I had a pretty bad wreck in it.”

He was driving six friends home from a party one night and was driving way too fast down a gravel road near Linton. “Well, I got in some loose gravel and lost control of the car and ended up going end over end into a cornfield.”

“End over end how many times,” the reporter in me asks.  

“We figured it was at least three,” he replied. The corn had been picked so there wasn’t much vegetation to soften the final landing.

“I was bruised up all over,” he said, and has to this day a long scar down his left shin from the crash. No one else got hurt.

He was able to drive the car home. He pushed up the collapsed top, replaced the shattered windshield, straightened up the steering wheel and got some chrome hinges at a junkyard to reattach the trunk lid. “I drove it awhile after that,“ he recalled.

Sullivan set that bad memory aside over the years. “I always wanted another shoebox Ford. I had a lot of good memories in that car, too.”

Ads for the shoebox Ford challenge drivers to “take the wheel, try the new Ford feel.” The car offered a smooth ride, picture windows, “sofa-wide seats” and “king-sized” brakes.

Six or seven years ago, Sullivan found his car. While looking at Craigslist ads he saw a 1950 shoebox Ford for sale southeast of Columbus. The original motor had been replaced with a flathead V-8 from a Mercury. It had a pretty smooth ride, “but it was rough as a cob inside, he said, describing the interior.

Sullivan is looking for someone to reupholster the interior. For now, there’s a beach towel covering the front bench seat.

The retired electrician re-did the wiring, replaced the spark plugs and points and fixed the overdrive system. It's shiny black, a lovely old car with simple accents.

He parks the car inside a climate-controlled garage at his home near Kirksville, next to a restored 1956 Ford he’s had 13 years and a 1977 Ford F-150 farm truck he bought new. The truck currently is in pieces, getting rebuilt.

Car show attenders may know the Sullivans’ 1956 Ford, the one they most often take to shows around southern Indiana. They enjoy the camaraderie and cars, but their 1956 never won an award.

Last year, on a whim, they left that car at home and drove their shoebox Ford to the Smithville Labor Day show. “We finally won a trophy,” he said.

When I ran into Wayne Sullivan at Hardees that night, he mentioned a story tip he sent me in 2013 about a man he met at a Boggs Lake car show who was driving his great-great grandfather’s 1956 Ford F-100 pickup. I tracked the man down and the column appeared in August of that year.

From 2013:Ford F100 stays in the family

Tune in next week, when I hope to report the current state of that old truck, and whether the toddler strapped into a car seat in the picture I had is in line to be the next driver.

Have a story to tell about a car or truck? Contact My Favorite Ride reporter Laura Lane at llane@heraldt.com or 812-318-5967.