Mere weeks before we entered 2025, I was blessed with a visit from my college-aged niece and her best friend, with their friendship going back to young childhood. It had been literally five years since my niece and I had seen each other in person. When they exited their car that arrived from the airport in the port cochere in front of my building, my eyes bugged out of their sockets. It’s like I blinked and she had gone from being an adorable adolescent to having blossomed into a beautiful, young adult with intelligence, grace, and also a strong gift for fashion and writing (she writes regularly for a campus paper, and I couldn’t be more proud).
Family-of-origin stuff can be complicated, but without even having the need to go into any of that, she and I decided that this time together afforded us the opportunity to basically start from scratch and get to know and see each other where we are right now. Her BFF was the perfect friend and person to complete our little trio, and now I also feel like her uncle, as well.
Nothing puts one’s age into perspective quite like being around teenagers and young adults that you remember from when they were infants or toddlers. Being a nonparent, I was never a direct witness to the day-to-day, month-to-month, year-to-year changes witnessed by those who are parents. I have joked with many in my middle-aged cohort how being this age is not at all like how our parents and other adults seemed to us when we were youths. To think of now being the age my mother was when I was my niece’s current age put so much into perspective… with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. In my mind, I’m still only maybe ten years or so older than I was when I had moved to Chicago in my late 20s. I eat well, stay in good physical shape, care about what I wear, and still take a few calculated risks in terms of my attire.
However, during the week of this Chicago visit from my niece and her friend, to whom I will now refer to as Jane and Camille, respectively, something unexpected happened as we were all getting ready to leave for our daily adventures. When looking through my bedroom closet for something to wear, my instinct to try to pull out something “cool” got smacked hard on the hand by some invisible force inside my mind. It’s one thing for me to go out by myself with my camera or meet up with friends while incorporating sartorial elements out of the ordinary into my overall presentation, as I’ll mix in items that are vintage, youthful, or colorful with other more “normal” pieces. I stand by my personal style and the way I express myself, but for whatever reason that week, I decided on outfits that made me look decidedly like the mature, grown, responsible adult. Uncle Joe had decided to let Jane and Camille corner the market that week, so to speak, on freedom of expression through clothing.
One thing my parents had never put me through was the embarrassment of trying to dress more youthfully than they were (this would have been a tough sell for my dad, who was forty-five and change when I was born), but I have seen enough cultural references to this phenomenon that I can almost empathize with those who had grown up with “cool” moms or dads. Isn’t there some happy medium between trying to dress youthfully and looking like a physics professor? Anyway, all of this is to say that I am growing to happily accept that there comes a time, and the clock creeps forward deceptively quickly and imperceptibly, where an adult may consider relinquishing overt expressions of coolness.
What helps me make peace with this is my belief that giving up on trying to look cool does not at all mean giving up style or class, which may then become the emphasis along with comfort. One glance at most of what’s hanging in my closet is evidence that while I will probably always hold onto my share of items that I’d assume most of my peers wouldn’t wear like I continue to, many of my everyday clothes now reflect a maturity that reflects much of the work I’ve done on myself, especially since the turn of this decade.
The redesigned 1967 Thunderbird has been the topic of a couple of my essay contributions over the past ten years, and judging from comments accompanying those essays, it seems to be a very polarizing car. I’ll restate that I like it, and not even in a root-for-the-underdog kind of way. I think it’s a genuinely attractive car. The large “mouth” grille with hidden headlamps has always looked exotic to me. What was it about furniture from around that time, where big-ticket items like console televisions and stereo systems were designed to have solid, fold-away panels that concealed the electronics behind? I feel like that was what was happening with the front of the ’67 T-Bird. I’m also a sucker for even the appearance of full-width taillamps, and cars like this Thunderbird and the also-redesigned ’67 Plymouth Barracuda wore this look very handsomely. This isn’t my absolute favorite generation of Thunderbird, but since when is that the main criteria by which we decide what we like? I just like it, and that’s enough.
Up to a certain point after its introduction for 1955, the Thunderbird had been something of a sporty car from its introduction. Even when equipped with fender skirts and vinyl roofs, all Thunderbirds had at least a hint of sport, and in some cases (especially with the first three years of two-seater) were overtly hip and youthful. By the time of the fifth-generation’s debut for ’67, there were other Fords that were more suited to scratch the sporty-car itch. The Thunderbird had been in the Ford family for twelve years by ’67, by which time there were also the Mustang and Mercury’s Cougar among other products to carry the style-banner, much like beautiful Jane’s arrival into the extended Dennis family in the mid-Aughts. Uncle Thunderbird no longer had to look cool within the Ford stable, so what did he do? He went all-in on maturity and luxuriousness, so much so that even a new four-door version was available, and as an upmarket Landau, no less.
Looking at the Thunderbird’s sales numbers from the mid-’60s leaves me with the feeling that I’m forgetting some part of the equation (which is entirely possible). From the advent of the 1958 “Squarebird”, the basic hardtop coupe had been the clear sales leader. This was the case all the way through ’65, but then a funny thing happened. The ’66 Landau hardtop coupe became the most popular of the four Thunderbirds offered that year, accounting for almost half of 69,200 sales at 35,100 units, and the base hardtop, at 13,400 units (~19%), was outsold that year by everything but the convertible. Once the soft-top disappeared with the 1967 redesign, the base coupe then became the least popular, selling only 15,600 copies. The newly-introduced Landau sedan seemed like one of Ford’s better ideas (as was that great advertising slogan), with almost 25,000 buyers. The Landau hardtop coupe was the sales winner, with 37,400 out of almost 78,000 total Thunderbirds chosen that year.
Things started out promisingly enough for the four-door Thunderbird, but by final-year 1971, it was the least popular configuration, with just under 6,600 sold. With everything trending toward luxury and sheer bigness with the advent of the 1970s, it seems to me that a four-door Thunderbird, even one toward built the end of a design cycle, should have continued to find a much broader audience before bowing out. People wanted coupes, I guess. Actually, I don’t guess. I know. So maybe, much like I am to Jane, the four-door Thunderbird was like the “old, queer uncle” of personal luxury cars – so different than what many were used to, including its novel, rear-hinged rear doors. It had grown from a hip, semi-sporty persona when it was younger into a car that had ceded its youthfulness to the next generation of new Ford products in order to present itself as an offering with a more mature sense of style. It was no longer cool, but it didn’t need to be. It needed only presence.
Downtown, The Loop, Chicago, Illinois.
Monday, February 26, 2024.
Brochure pages were sourced from www.oldcarbrochures.org.
My other takes on the 1967 Ford Thunderbird may be found here and here.
Joseph: My everyday sartorial outfits lean toward the “outlier” army-navy, goodwill thrift store type. I only marginally tried to be hip or stylish when I “wore a younger man’s clothes!” Now, it’s more sensible, timeless, rather than trendy. I was totally in love with the “Flairbirds” of ’64-’66, with the ’66 being my all time favorite. The ’67 was a big letdown for me, although in later years I came to grudgingly appreciate the coupe, the four door remained an abomination. But as Sly stated, “different strokes for different folks”, and nowadays I can appreciate ANY survivor. The T-bird captured by your photo looks to be in fine shape!! 🙂
I love this generation of the T-Bird, it has plenty of personality and style.