Maybe, before she was yours, your car had an quite an interesting life and story to tell.
Here is one.
Please fell free to add your own.
YVETTE'S CAR AFTER ALL
For twelve years, my only car was a 1954 Mercury Monterey coupe. She was already 32 years old when I bought her from a friend in 1986, but in a very fine and original shape, sporting only 55.000 miles on the odometer. And she still had her original twin exhaust pipes and silencers.
The license plate number showed that it had been last licensed In 1963 in Paris.
The paint, also original, was a light blue called Atlantic Blue, but the top was painted a lighter blue that didn't match any of the color combinations offered by Mercury. I felt this was rather pretty and a more original two-toning than would have been a white top, and stopped wondering.
Many years later, I was still thinking of the Mercury as MY car, although I eventually had to sell her. One day I asked my friend about the light blue top. – The top? , he said. Oh yes, it's me. I had to have it painted anew when I bought the car, because it was showing dents and scratches. It was white, before. Arctic White, they called it at Mercury.
Then, years later again, I stumbled across this picture of famous accordionist Yvette Horner, riding on top of a 1954 Mercury Monterey, with seemingly a light colored body and a white top, playing her accordion in the 1958 Tour de France caravan. The car, like mine, lacks fender skirts. Contrarily to many GM cars of the period, the Fords, Mercs and Lincolns were almost as elegant without their skirts, so they were more easily discarded. The license plate, also a Paris plate, was older, so he car might have gone to another province before coming back to Paris in 1963. If it was my Mercury I mean, but the Plexiglas "windbreaker" fixed on the top, sheltering dear Yvette from the bugs and mosquitoes that plagued her with the Citroën Traction and the Ford Vedette she rode before, definitely says it is mine, accounting for the blue top.
Yvette was a huge star for years, her own kind of a French Dolly Parton or even Liberace in her way, often wearing huge mariachi sombreros and other extravaganza, and, now 91, still keeps her hair a flamboyant red, as far as I know.
She was often pictured, on the Tour de France, kissing the winner. Louison Bobet, for instance, a triple winner in the 1950s, my idol as I listened to the race day after day on the radio, every July.
When the Beatles and Dylan struck France, she may have become the epitome of corny for us teenagers, but, anyway, I got to drive her car in the end.
And now I wonder how she never fell of that top.
Ray B.
