My Favorite Ride: Who owns that 1964 Ford Falcon Ranchero?

SPENCER — The sign on the employee bulletin board at the Indianapolis Ford Motor Co. plant was brief. And to the point.

“For Sale: 1964 Ranchero.”

Jack Arthur was working as an electrical contractor at the factory back in 1987 when he saw the handwritten note about a 23-year-old vehicle someone didn’t want any more.

“It didn’t say who was selling it, and had no phone number to call,” Arthur recalled.

He asked around. “The guys said it was probably Nick Duda selling the car, and that I’d find him out in the plant somewhere. Mind you, there were hundreds of workers out there back then.”

So he set out on the factory floor seeking a pipe fitter named Nick Duda.

And found him.

“He said he’d lost interest in the Ranchero and wanted to sell it,” Arthur said. “It only had 43,000 miles on it.”

He told me the original owner had sold the car, missed it and at some point bought it back.

“Nick said the guy then painted it yellow,” Arthur said. “With a brush.”

That brings to mind Dale Shields, and the 1965 Chevrolet pickup he inherited from his mom that was featured in My Favorite Ride in February 2008. Shields used turquoise Rustoleum paint for the body and bed and white for the top, applied with a paint brush and smooth-nap roller.

“If you stand two feet away and look at it, you’d never know I painted it with a roller,” he said 11 years ago. “And when it rains, the water rolls right off.”

He had planned to give the truck to his granddaughter McKenzie, who was just 9 years old then. She already was learning how to steer, sitting on her grandfather’s lap while driving around the neighborhood.

“I think it’s really cool that when I get older I can drive it to high school,” she said in 2008. I wonder if she did.

Back to Arthur’s 1964 Ford Falcon Ranchero ...

After Duda purchased the hybrid car-truck, he sanded off that yellow paint and sprayed the body with red, black and gray primer, Arthur said, intending to repaint it the proper way.

Arthur said the car was in pretty good shape when he bought it. He had the seats reupholstered and replaced the headliner, then painted it the usual way, applying several thin coats of color with a paint sprayer.

It was first an early-Cadillac shade of purple, and is now a shiny light metallic green intended for Buicks, not Fords.

He keeps the Ranchero parked inside a giant garage alongside the rare butterscotch-and beige 1929 Chevrolet Imperial Landau convertible I wrote about last week and another vehicle, circa 1931, that he vows never to part with.

And that I’ll write about next week.