Gail Wise didn’t know she was making history nearly 50 years ago. In 1964, the 22-year-old elementary school teacher knew that nothing in the Johnson Ford dealership on Cicero Avenue in Chicago would make her commute to the suburbs any more fun.
Until the salesman said he had a brand new model just delivered that hadn’t officially gone on sale yet.
“The salesman said this was a special car,” says Wise, who lives in Park Ridge. Coming from a family of Ford convertibles, Wise was looking for something like her parents’ 1963 Thunderbird or 1957 Ford Fairlane.
“Under the tarp was this baby blue Mustang convertible,” Wise recalls. “This is for me, I said, I love it.”
She remembers the date like the birth of a child. “It was April 15, 1964, two days before Lee Iacocca unveiled it at the New York World’s Fair.”
Ford has celebrated the 50th birthday of the Mustang with the much anticipated unveiling of the all-new 2015 Ford Mustang. Gail Wise and her husband Tom have been invited to show off their Mustang, the world’s first "known" production Ford Mustang sold, at Ford’s headquarters in Dearborn, Mich.
Gail can’t help but feel things have come full circle from 50 years ago.
“When I drove it out of the showroom everyone was staring at me and waving and giving me high fives,” she says. “I felt like a movie star.”
The response was doubled at Sunnyside School in the near-west suburb of Berkeley, where the new car made the new teacher very popular. Yet it wasn’t until Tom, who married Gail in 1966, began using the car as a daily commuter to his job as an electrical engineer that the life of the Mustang would grow to something bigger than just being a car.
By 1979, with minor problems to the carburetor and 15 years of Chicago winters eating through the floor, the Mustang stopped running. It got pushed into the garage, a problem to be solved later.
“I kept telling myself I would fix it next week, next month, next year,” Tom says.
Instead, the baby blue elephant remained in the garage. As their four kids grew and space became a precious commodity, Gail encouraged Tom to get rid of it. Instead, he built an addition to their two car garage and made it his retirement project in the early 2000s.
The rusted-out shell was restored, the interior was remade all to the original factory settings, and 20 months later, in late 2007, the Mustang appeared the same as it did when it left the factory. “I’m the type of guy that puts everything back the way it was,” says Tom, who has always been a car guy.
The 1964½ Mustang, as midyear releases were called then, had (and still has) the latest features such as an automatic transmission, backup lights, Rally-Pac instrument cluster, power steering, two-speed wipers, a power top, everything powered except power brakes. And its baby blue luster has been restored.
Even after the restoration was complete, the Wises had no idea the Mustang was anything more than a cool restored car. They began driving it to local shows, since it would never again be something stored in a garage.
In 2008, when someone else claimed they had the first Mustang, Tom found the original handwritten bill of sale, dated two days prior to the premature claim, and won title to the world’s first production Mustang.
It cost $3,400 in 1964, a big chunk of Gail’s first year salary of $5,100. Now it’s valued anywhere between $100,000 and a quarter of a million dollars.
But after nearly 50 years, it may never leave the Wise family. “Our 11-year-old granddaughter, the oldest of 5, asked if she can have it when she turns 16,” Tom says. “I haven’t given her an answer.”
https://www.chicagotribune.com/classified/automotive/chi-first-ford-mustang-50-years-story.html
Beautiful, even today.........................
Ping
Who was first is often hard to determine, and attempts to settle the question can raise hackles.
Whether Ron Hermann was the earliest Mustang buyer – or maybe it was actually Gail Wise – may not be as important as identifying the first European to set foot in the Americas, but some Mustang lovers care deeply. To them, it’s right up there with the question of who was first to the North Pole – Cook or Peary? – or whether Gustave Whitehead flew before the Wright Brothers.
The Philadelphia Connection
Ron Hermann of Warminster, Pa., says he was the first buyer. Although some details are fuzzy after more than 50 years, he does remember that he was 17 years old when Barr Ford of Philadelphia took delivery of a blue Mustang convertible. The car was not available for immediate delivery as it was scheduled for display at local dealerships.
Barr’s general manager, a friend of Hermann’s father, let the teen see the car more than a week before the official introduction date of April 17. He committed on the spot – it was April 8, as he recalls – and put $100 down toward the purchase. For seemingly endless weeks he followed the car from dealership to dealership as it was displayed on a turntable, warning onlookers not to touch his car. The original bill of sale has been lost, but if he actually purchased the car on April 8, he would be the first Mustang buyer. Hermann’s title is dated May 14.
Today, the car has 17,000 miles on the clock and still wears its original tires. It’s a true survivor and a beautiful example of what has come to called a ‘64½ Mustang (though they were officially 1965 models).
The Wise Contender
Gail Wise of Park Ridge, Ill., may have been buyer number one — and Ford agrees. Hermann would contest that, but we can say with some certainty that Wise was first to drive a Mustang on the street.
A recent graduate on her way to becoming a schoolteacher, Wise went shopping for a car with her parents on April 15, 1964 — two days before Lee Iacocca was to unveil the car at the New York World’s Fair. She was disappointed to find no convertibles at Johnson Ford in Chicago. Not wanting to lose a customer, the salesman led her to the back of the dealership to show her something that had just come in.
The new arrival was a baby blue Mustang convertible. It was love at first sight. Wise recalls the salesman said he wasn’t supposed to sell the car, but greed apparently got the better of him, and within hours Wise was driving the streets of Chicago and waving to the car’s admirers. When Iacocca revealed the car to the world two days later, he didn’t know he’d been upstaged by a Chicago schoolteacher.
First Built
The first Mustang sold almost certainly wasn’t the first produced. Serial number 100001, the first of the sequence, is in the Henry Ford museum in Dearborn, Mich. But Bob Casey, the museum’s former curator of transportation, doesn’t believe it was first built, reasoning that the first car produced would probably have been a coupe, a less complex vehicle.
In other words, when it comes to automotive production and sales history more than half century old, we only know that we don’t know very much.
For more on Wise and her Ford Mustang, watch this video.
He was Mustang buyer number one, but she was too
Paul Stenquist // May 18, 2016
https://www.hagerty.com/articles-videos/Articles/2016/05/18/First-Mustang
Chick car.
Huh, I wonder how he figured that out????
Beautiful.
The original Mustangs have aged well - that is still eye candy.
Thank You for the Post.
Pony Ping!!!
Neat pics. That car is in amazing shape. Any others showing what’s under the hood?