My Favorite Ride: Ranchero's truck tough, but its trim not so much

The first time I saw Dick Spiegler’s 1969 Ford Ranchero, the two-door coupe utility vehicle was missing something — a thin strip of chrome trim that had wrapped around the front fender’s headlight area on the passenger side.

He had driven his 50-year-old Ranchero through the car wash at the Winslow Road Marathon station that morning after filling the tank with 93-octane gasoline. Then he cruised up South Walnut Street to the Cars & Coffee event at The Herald-Times.

“What happened here?” I asked, noticing the missing piece of chrome while admiring the green half car/half truck.

He leaned in and retrieved the chrome trim from the front seat. “When we got here I noticed right away it was missing, so we hurried on back to the car wash and I went in and found it inside along the wall,” the 86-year-old Bloomington resident said.

Close call. Then a man he met at the car show who drives an old El Camino, Chevrolet’s version of the Ranchero, offered to order the special clips needed to secure the trim.

“He called me the other day and he’s got them,” Spiegler said this week when I checked in.

He told me he bought the Ranchero — they were manufactured from 1967 through 1979 — back in 2006. But he had known it many years before.

The vehicle had belonged to Bill Ackerson, who with his wife, Margaret, lived on the farm next door to Spiegler’s parents in South Dakota. “He bought it brand new, probably in the fall of 1968 when they first came out,” Spiegler recalled. “He sold that year’s crop and bought that Ranchero, and he used it around the farm.”

When the Ackersons moved to the state of Washington, the Ranchero went with them.

Spiegler got to thinking about buying an old car after his wife, Lois, died. He needed a project, something to do and get him out of the house. “I started thinking about it, and got to looking and wondered what ever happened to that Ranchero. And my sister, who visits them every year, said Bill had died and the Ranchero was for sale.”

He called Margaret Ackerson, who agreed to hold the car for him, refusing a down payment. Spiegler got there a few months later and drove the old Ranchero to Bloomington on the Fourth of July weekend. “It just cruised along, although it was pretty hot without any air conditioning.”

His friend Paul Brown cleaned and tuned the engine a year ago, taking most of the winter to complete the project. “It was running pretty rough for awhile,” he said. “Not any more.”

Spiegler and I have made an agreement: no more automatic car washes for this classic.