I’ve been waiting for a long time to find a baby-blue ’64 Falcon 2-door sedan with the 170 inch six and 2-speed Fordomatic. The location near the university is icing on the cake. Why? Something to do with a road trip with a female student who had one just like it. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a very happy one; blame it on the Falcon.
In the spring of 1973, I found myself back in the Baltimore area for a few months, and I reconnected again with my main former high school girlfriend. She was going to school at Essex Community College, and drove…you guessed it. It was identical to this one except it was a base Falcon, not as lavishly trimmed as this Futura.
On the three-day Easter weekend we decided to go visit her older sister who, lived in Manhattan. And for reasons unknown to me at the moment, we took her Falcon instead of my ’63 Corvair Monza 4-speed. I drove, of course. And we decided to not drive on any freeways, which was a thing I had at the time, taking only two lane highways and country roads. Well, that ended up to be a rather long and tedious drive, and not just because the old highways in New Jersey were a lot busier than I had expected. Something to do with her Falcon.
That something was that two-speed Fordomatic, teamed with the 101 (gross) hp 170 six (about 75 in today’s hp). Yeah, it could have been worse…the 144 inch six. Actually it couldn’t, in 1964, as the 144 was mercifully no longer available with the automatic. But the 170 was plenty bad enough. And for 1965, the Fordomatic was thankfully gone altogether, tossed on the ash heap of transmission history, replaced by the much better 3-spped C4 Selectshift automatic.
The 170 bleated like a lamb at slaughter, from my endless full-throttle efforts to gain some speed. I’m not sure exactly what routes we took, but it was through Northern Maryland, Eastern Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. Much of the way was through hilly country. I can hear that Falcon six wailing away up the grades. It didn’t matter much if I pulled the selector into Low or left it in Drive; the result was mostly the same, except for the pitch of the engine. I was really missing my Corvair.
Of course that was only half the story, as the Falcon’s steering was as sloppy as Joes, and the handling, such as it was, on the little 13″ bias ply tires, made it the most un-fun driving trip I’ve pretty much ever had. I’m one of those guys who’s pretty open minded about cars’ limitations, and I’ve had plenty of fun in slower cars, like in my dad’s ’68 Dart with the 170 inch slant six and three speed manual on the winding back roads of Baltimore County. But that felt like a rocket compared to the Falcon. It was a genuine dog. More like a slug. No fun at all, no matter how hard I tried. I just gave up and resigned myself to my fate.
Frankly, I made a mistake to take all those back roads. By the time we hit the endless exurbs in New Jersey on Good Friday afternoon, traffic was terrible. It became a slog. And it reminded me why I lived in Iowa; I’d forgotten how bad traffic can be. My back ached from that slab of a seat. I was not in a good mood. No wonder I have such negative associations of this Falcon.
By the time we crossed over into Manhattan, it was dark.
And then we had to find her sister’s place, which was in a rather odd location, in an old commercial area, in the general area of the garment district, if I remember correctly. It was totally dead there at night. The apartment was up a couple of flights over commercial spaces (none of the vintage shots are mine).
And her sister was pretty weird, and her boy friend was none too friendly. I always loved being in New York, even just walking around the city back then was an endless side show. I could have done it for days on end. But I don’t have any clear memories of doing that on this trip. Carole wasn’t into just roaming the streets like I was.
I remember: she loved movies, so we saw several of them. You can sit in a movie theater in any old town. Of course the selection wasn’t as good as on 42nd Street.
I did get plenty of sidewalk roaming in just a year and a half later I found myself back in the city, an actor in an experimental theater company, and we had a six week gig in the Village, off-off-off Broadway.
We performed at night, so I had all day to roam the city, much of it on foot.
But I’m digressing. The truth was, it was not a fun trip. Our hosts were odd, getting back with an old girlfriend is often not a good idea, and the drive up in the Falcon sucked.
So on Sunday morning we climbed back in and hit…I-95, and listened to the steady moan and drone of the Falcon six as it struggled to maintain a decent cruising speed. This was before the energy crisis and the 55 mile limit, which was a blessing bestowed by the Great White Father to all Falcon six owners.
Enough of the memories and the negativity. It’s great to see this one parked in front of a student house, and one that even flies its flags so proudly. Is there a Falcon flag?
What happened to Carole? I’m craving an epilogue.
Well, if you really must know:
Carole was my first serious GF, and we had this on-off relationship that spanned some years. We met in 11th grade art class, and were very chummy for about a year. I got to know her parents; I really loved her mom. In a curious coincidence, her oldest sister was also my English teacher at Towson High that year.
But I broke up with her in the fall of 12th grade for no particular reason except that I was a jerk. or something like that.
I moved to Iowa a few months later, but I was back in Baltimore twice, in ’73 and ’75, and both time got back together. But I wasn’t ready to settle down, always on the go. Meanwhile she was studying to be a social worker.
Her dad, an architect, was originally from Oregon, and he decided to move to Portland in about 1976. Carole and both of her sisters soon joined them there.
In the fall of 1977, I was living in LA, finally settling down and working at the tv station. I was renting a garage studio apartment that was behind….Stephanie’s mom’s house. Stephanie’s mom was in Europe for a few months; Stephanie was my landlady! We were just friends.
I woke up one morning and decided that I was ready to get married. Seriously. So I called Carole and told her I’d like to come visit her. So I flew up to Portland for a couple of days, and told her that. But this time she turned me down!
It just wasn’t meant to be. But we had a couple of fun days and we drove out to the coast in her Automatic Stickshift Beetle, which drove me nuts because I had a habit of resting my hand on a stick shift, and every time my hand touched it, it would of course disengage the clutch.
Within weeks of returning from that trip, Stephanie and I started escalating our relationship from friends to lovers. And we got married within a couple of months.
But: Carole and I have maintained a good friendship all these decades. We still talk about once every year or two. Stephanie and I went up to Portland to visit a few years back, and got to see her mom; which was great. Last I heard this past year, her mom is still alive.
Carole married a pediatric cardiologists, and has three kids.
We’ve laughed about our on-off relationship. When she was ready, I wasn’t; and vice versa.
So there you have the story about Carole. A sweet woman. But I have no regrets as to how it turned out.
Great epilogue, Paul. Nice that you stayed in touch and maintained a suitably chummy (and distant!) acquaintance. I have often wondered why so many relationships seem to drift in post-split acrimony, certainly there is often enough residual merit in the former partner to render them something less than the antichrist.
Squint your eyes and you can maybe see how the Mustang was created…..Actually, A friends sister had one and hated it, thought it was boring. Until one evening, at dusk. it was in profile and he pointed out to his sister how it had Mustang dimensions (sort of) her opinion of her little red falcon Futura improved. And her next car was a 68 Mustang.
I always thought the ’60-65 Falcon sedans were much better-proportioned than the hardtop whose roof looks like it’s meant for a smaller car.
Did the Mustang carry over the Falcon dash-to-front axle dimension unchanged, or was it longer? Blatant opinion time but it could’ve done with about 3-4″ less hood length.
No. The Mustang was a completely new body with new proportions. It just had the Falcon’s running gear attached to it.
It seems that transitioning from a Falcon to a Mustang was a fairly common occurrence in the 1960s. Our family always drove Cadillacs, Lincolns, Buicks and Oldsmobiles, but we also had a 1960 Falcon Tudor Sedan (three-speed stick), followed by a 1963 Tudor Sedan (three-speed stick) and a 1966 Mustang 2+2 Fastback (200 cube six with automatic). By the time the Mustang was traded, in 1967, I was the principal driver, and I chose a Firebird 326 with three-speed manual transmission. I am forever grateful that I never had to take a trip in either Falcon, but the ’63 ably served as my tutor when learning how to drive a stick. Although they were relatively simple and plain-looking cars, I still thought that the first-generation Falcons were a good automotive bargain.
Is nobody going to comment on the fact that this thing is sporting hood pins? Now, that’s rich.
Oddly, I recall a late 80’s road trip through the same geographic area in the opposite direction (from NJ to Virginia and back) in a beige 1984 Ford Tempo 2-door automatic with an old college friend. This recounting feels so familiar. Neither Ford 2 door sedans nor early-twenty-something formerly close consorts had apparently changed in 20 years’ time. Horrible trip.
I would image the cheap rent paid for the apartment in ’73 is SKY high today. I would image the building is now a co-op with steep financial requirements before accepting an application. Better yet, it’s listed on BnB with a daily rate more than the ’73 monthly rate!!🤨🤨🤨🤨
MTN:
Hood pins on this car aren’t really all that laughable. In 1971 I bought my first car, a 68 Mercury Cyclone GT. It didn’t have hood pins but about a month after I bought it I wished it had had them. Driving down a 2 lane road in rural Maryland the hood suddenly flew up. To a 19 year old driver that was quite unsettling. After stopping the car, (thank heaven there was no traffic) I tried to close the hood, but couldn’t as the corners of the hood were bent back at a near 90 degree angle.
To add insult to injury, about 6 months later, after changing the oil I was unable to open the hood to add new oil.
That’s interesting, in all these years of doing oil changes on 40+ cars now I can’t recall an instance where I would drain the oil and/or remove the filter without opening the hood first even though on the vast majority of them there was not really a reason to do it in that order. I’ve never really considered that there might be a different way to do it. Usually I remove the cap as I must think that it helps the oil to drain.
Edit – Actually I guess I take that back, on the 911 I tend to drain and remove the filter before opening the engine cover. I don’t know why…But that’s the only one. What do others do?
Yeah I always at least pop the hood release and open the hood before starting. Of course not of fear that it won’t open but because I don’t want to get greasy fingerprints on anything.
I also always open the hood and crack the filler cap. ‘Cause that’s how I learned to do it 45 years ago, why change now?
If you think that Falcon was a slug, try the same powertrain in a ’64 station wagon with a family of five aboard.
I recently read Lee Iacocca’s autobiography (no pun intended) , published in 1984. He credits (or blames) the Falcon to Robert McNamara, the Edsel-killing Ford executive who later became Secretary of Defense.
McNamara wasn’t a car guy and simply didn’t understand any emotional attachment to cars. Pleasure in performance, style or luxury meant nothing to him. He believed only in basic, economic utilitarian transportation. The compact, slow, cheap and humorless nature of the Falcon, in full display here was all McNamara.
Fortunately, Robert left shortly afterwards, and the engineers at Ford who actually understood cars later engineered some frivolous fun into the platform.
Your description of McNamara actually sounds a bit like the old Henry himself, but industry had moved on.
For McNamara SecDef follies (LBJ’s “Lard-Hair Man”), look up “Project 100,000.”
Funny you mention that. I came across some videos on Project 100,000 just last week, and I was appalled. Yes, McNamara was a very smart man, but sometimes to the exclusion of common sense. Imho he was sometimes ill suited to decision making that included an understanding of the relevant human elements.
ITA. McNamara with LBJ as his boss was deadly – watch Fog of War to confirm. JFK could have reigned him in and I believe would have effectively ended our participation in the Vietnam War in 1965. He was always skeptical about Mac’s “numbers.”
In William Knoedelseder’s new book on Harley Earl he relates the story of McNamara telling Frank Hershey that Ford will design one instrument panel and use it in all of their cars across the board. Hershey explodes: “If you want to stop people from buying Ford cars, then just do that. Don’t you know that there is a little boy in every man, Mac, and they like to think they are in command of the car? All those instruments on the board. What do you see when you are driving the car? Ninety-nine percent of the time you are sitting behind that instrument board and it wants to be pleasant and informative and make you feel like you are in control. Mac, I don’t think you’v ever been a kid.”
Iacocca once said that McNamara wore granny glasses, and in the Falcon he’d created a granny car.
In the late 90’s, I had a chance to buy a Falcon 4 door sedan, a ’64 I think, for $800. It was the first and only time I used a “three on the tree”. It had 70,000 miles and drove very well. But I didn’t have all the money and it sold the next day. I really wanted it. For the price it was very cool. It was white and had the original baby moons. One of my cars at the time was a ’78 Zephyr Z7, and after driving the Falcon it felt like a Cadillac. But I still wanted it. Light blue seats, and I believe only lap belts, and slow as hell. But so neat in a humble way.
I had a base model ’64 in college (early ’70’s) with the same combo-tired 170, 2 speed auto and loose suspension. Passing on a two lane road was an adventure-floor it, pull out and pray. Actually wasn’t terrible in snow with decent tires though.
When I was attending the community college in my hometown (circa 1970-71) we would sometimes go to lunch in a friends Falcon, equipped with the mighty 170/Fordomatic combination. As you might imagine this vehicle, with three or four adult males aboard, was a complete and total slug. I always thought that the 1961 Ford Fairlane I drove in high school was a dog but it was much quicker than the Falcon, relatively speaking of course. We never ran them side by side but I’m pretty sure that another friend’s 1961 VW Bug would have smoked the Falcon in any type of speed contest, 0-60 in eventually.
These Falcons were before my time**, but I bought its spiritual successor in the form of a Fairmont Futura in 1979 as my first new car.
With the 200 straight-six and an ‘automatic’ 3-on-the-tree (C4, I think), it too was quite the slug. It was a nice looking car though.
**correction: The subject car’s 1964 model year is more recent than my own model year of 1960 ;o) – Needless to say, I wasn’t car aware yet… that would start to happen in 1965 staring with the big Chevys (at 5 years old).
A friend in college had a ’63 Comet with a six and the two-speed. That was the slowest accelerating car I’ve ever ridden in.
I think my ’64 Falcon could beat out the ’63 Comet for the ‘Slowest Accelerating’ award. I have to warm the car up for a few minutes or the Ford-O-Matic won’t upshift past 35. You can hear the car ~wanting~ to upshift . . . but it won’t do it right away. The colder it is the longer it takes. I’ve never had the transmission rebuilt so I just put the hesitation down to advancing age. It didn’t used to take so long for The Mighty 2-Speed to get to 40 mph . . . but that was then.
Old age has already long crept up on cars of the 1960s and I’m just glad mine still runs pretty well despite the patience it requires to ‘wake it up’.
Just got hit by “slowdown” again. I remember driving the same northern Maryland roads in our ’64 Dart, 225/auto. Going to York, PA or Fredericksburg, MD, just for the fun of it. After our ’57 Chevy 6/auto, the Dart felt like a Corvette!
Fredericksburg is in VA… Frederick is in MD, and used to be a charming town but pretty much a bedroom community of DC these days.
Is it possible to miss a world with baby blue cars even though it would never be a color I would choose for myself?
This is one generation I never spent any time in. I got the lesson in how easy the translation was from Falcon to Mustang from two cars: the early 1970 Falcon 200 6/3 speed driven by a high school friend and a 68 Mustang with the same powertrain that I owned a couple of years later. They sounded, felt and drove almost identically, except that you sat lower in the mustang. OK, the doors sagged more in the Mustang too.
Definitely possible to miss a colour you wouldn’t buy.
This is just a sweet, lovely thing that has kept it’s head held high over all these years. It may not be the quickest thing on the road, but then again, not everything needs to be about horsepower. I say this as an American too. Keep on flying little Falcon!
Also, Mr. Niedermeyer, you’ll be pleased to know that there actually IS a Falcon flag!
Well there is this one too, but it is irrelevant once you get out of the Atlanta area. 🙂
Well, hopefully after this weekend’s game (against the Baltimore Ravens), that flag will be flying at half staff. 😉
Quoteth the Raven (‘s defense), Never Score.
How many of us have gotten lonely…and called up old girlfriends? Whatever car she owned, I always regretted making the call. Knowing what I know now, she would need to drive a Hellcat Challenger to make the call worthwhile.
Well, if I called up an old g/f and found she’d happily married a pediatric cardiologist, I’d have regrets too….. a feeling of happiness for her, overwhelmed by a sense of inadequacy for me.
How did they manage to make the falcon so slow? It’s a relatively small light car and a 170 six isn’t really that small an engine. The Brit Zephyr/zodiac was roughly the same size with a 2.5 litre six, that was never a slow car. I think Ford U.S did it deliberately to punish you for cheaping out on a less profitable falcon, and hopefully upsell you into a full size.
But that Zephyr wasn’t saddled with the two-speed Fordomatic. With the three speed manual, the Falcon six was bearable; it really wanted the four-speed UK-sourced manual that was available n ’62-’63, but hardly anyone was willing to pay extra for.
I suspect the UK 2.5 six had a bit more hp too; these were tuned very conservatively for maximum economy.
ROFLMAO, Kids today on a local FB classic car site/page consider any old American/Australian car to be a muscle car, The day they get out of their Corolla/Civic/Semtra and drive an early Falcon six they are in for a rude shock, mine had glacial performance and steered like a small boat, but having just junked a 64 Holden I wasnt expecting much if any improvement at least I couldnt see thru the floors in the Falcon. My MK2 Zephyr went better or at least seemed to have done.
Thats why they made Valiants Bryce 🙂
With the base (in Australia) 225 the early Valiants were really the hot family cars of their day. But these Falcons, in automatic form, were unbelievable for the opposite sort of reason. I was so glad Dad’s was a manual.
Quite a story… some things are never meant to be rekindled. I bought a 6 cylinder ‘68 Falcon to replace my first car, a ‘64 GTO… bought it from a young father of 3 little kids and I extracted what must have been 5 or 6 pounds of broken cookies out of the back seat and surrounding area. My lasting memory of that car was as follows: I was the service manager of a small billiard table manufacturer when I was going to college in Southern California. I was working long days after attending classes in the morning and one Friday, I decided to drive with 2 friends up to June Lake in the Sierra Nevada for a fishing and camping weekend. I worked until 8pm and after getting my gear together, I headed over to one of the guys apartment, where the other friend was to meet us. First friend’s roommate was having a party, so needless to say, with all the pretty ladies, music and controlled substances, we didn’t get any sleep before hitting the road at 2:30am. The Falcon ran great, could not hear the described engine droning over the LED Zep IV and Stones Exile on Main Street 8 track tapes blasting. As we arrived in the mountains, the last thing I remember was driving on a road to the Devil’s Postpile, before being violently shaken awake, as I’d fallen asleep behind the steering wheel. After all the yelling and alarmed chaos finished, much hilarity ensued.
Below from a Popular Mechanics comparison of the Falcon (170/auto)–that sure would be s-l-o-w today. For a ranking of even slower 0-60 times, see here: https://www.zeroto60times.com/slowest-cars-0-60-mph-times/show/100/
If I got 21.13 miles per gallon on my Falcon I’d be shocked. I drive it at steady speeds and do not slam the gas pedal to the floor [not that it would do any good in such a slow car, anyway!] but after 54 years and an un-rebuilt engine I’m thinkin’ I get more like 15 or 16 mpg.
Sadly I’ve had way too much experience with this engine. We had two Fairlanes, a 63 and 64 with the 170. The 63 was Fordomatic and the 64 was manual. The manual made a lot of difference. The Fordomatic combo was positively unsafe at times. We had three Falcons, two with the 144 and one with the 170, all manuals. My Dad was on an economy kick in those days and we all suffered through it☺!
What a nice sight. A Falcon Sprint perched on the side of the road after taking its owner from Point A to Point B. Falcons want to take you places and work hard for you. They just don’t do it quickly. 😀
Something about this Sprint I noted: The car doesn’t have back-up lights. The center of each tail lens is where the back-up lights would be added . . . but there’s nothing there.
My Falcon and this one both have the same kind of hubcaps with the ‘FALCON’ in the middle. I’ve seen at least 2 other different types of hubcaps/wheel covers on other ’64s over the years, but I’m very pleased with the hubcaps which are on my Falcon and the one pictured above.
Something else: In the ’64 Owner’s Manual I never saw an option for a side-view mirror on the passenger side of the car. I reckon I could’ve missed seeing that option somehow over the past 29 years in the booklet. No matter, it is interesting to note the passenger-side mirror. I wish I would’ve driven up on that Sprint! I could have had a lot of fun giving it The Hairy Eyeball! It is a rare occurrence indeed when I chance upon another Falcon ‘live’ and up close. 99.9999% of the time I only see other Falcons in pictures on the Internet.
“Sprint”? I don’t see a Sprint. Do you?
My bad. I don’t know what I was thinking when I typed ‘Sprint’. 😀 Any Falcon with a ‘170’ and a Ford-O-Matic isn’t going to Sprint anywhere . . .
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I have no trim pieces on mine. The area around the gas tank — including the gas cap — is simply painted the same turquoise color as the car. → Was that ’64 you drove all those years ago one of those ‘deluxe’ Standard Series models which still had the cursive script but with a lil’ bit of trim on the sides and a hood ornament? If not, then I reckon you drove another official Cheapo Falcon.
I’m struggling to remember. It was certainly a base Falcon, not a Futura like this one. But I think it had the external trim package, which included bright window surrounds and a single bright spear across the sides. That’s what I’m seeing in my mind’s eye, but then it’s been a while. And it wasn’t the kind of car that inspired intense memories. 🙂
The picture of the powder blue 4-door sedan on the thread “1964 FALCON — PLAIN AND SIMPLE” from 4/15/2012 and then re-printed 5/24/15 appears to be a ‘Deluxe’ standard series sedan with the single spear across the sides and the hood ornament, but I could not tell from the pictures if the bright window surrounds were there. Of course, I reckon they could have been removed over time and as for the fancier gas cap I really don’t know if it’s original or not.
A sort-of example: When my original side-view mirror blew off in 2011 I sought out a replacement shortly thereafter. When it arrived it was not the same mirror style I’d had. I never even thought when I ordered it that there were different-size mirrors. Live and learn. So the side-view mirror that is now bolted to my front door is not the original one that came with the car. Could be the same with the gas cap . . . at some point it was lost and the replacement didn’t match. [Btw, I kept my old mirror just for posterity].
Carter, I’ve got a Ford Australia Falcon accessory brochure from 1960, and it’s amazing how many different styles of various accessories there were, and how many things you’d never think of adding to a car today. From memory the mirrors came in round or rectangular, plain or fancy. Dad’s 170 manual had the plain round on thé driver’s side fender; our neighbour who was a pathologist had two fancy rectangular ones on his 144 automatic.
That wins you the internet for today. Tomorrow looks pretty good, too.
As far as the ’64’s handling goes . . . I’d never let anyone drive it as I’d be very worried they’d end up in a ditch. I tell the mechanic to test drive it as needed [usually after the brakes have been worked on], but otherwise this car is way too primitive for me to trust anyone else to get behind its wheel.
Occasionally I am asked how the Falcon handles and I say it’s easy for me to navigate it around town. A nice easy answer.
I have no idea how my Falcon compares handling-wise to other cheap and/or sluggish FoMoCo products like, say, a ’69 Maverick, a ’71 Pinto, a ’75 Granada or a ’78 Fairmont as I’ve never driven any of them (from any model year).