The initial wave of Mustang mania that swept the country in the mid-1960s had barely subsided when in 1972 Jerry Lane decided that an early Mustang would be an ideal project car.
With his 9-year-old daughter, Janise, along for company, he left their home in Spotsylvania and headed for the University of Maryland where a coed was selling her well-worn white 1966 Mustang convertible.
After a quick test drive, the deal was done and the father/daughter duo drove the Mustang home with the top down.
The daughter, now Mrs. Janise Nichols, recalls at the time thinking, “My dad is the coolest guy in the world.”
He tinkered with the 200-cubic-inch, 120-horsepower, six-cylinder engine until it was running to his satisfaction. By the time Janise was of driving age, the Mustang was in fine condition. Mrs. Nichols remembers driving it to high school when her turn in the car pool arrived. Her classmates seemed to enjoy the Mustang convertible as much as she did.
Before she entered the University of Georgia, her father died. He had wanted her to take the Mustang to college, which she eventually did after her sophomore year.
Georgia was not kind to her Mustang. The summer weather was so hot that the plastic rear window melted. Thereafter, whenever the rains came the interior was as damp as the exterior.
Mrs. Nichols recollects that during one bout of collegiate enthusiasm she had 21 students in her car — with the top down, of course. The local constabulary took a dim view of the slightly overloaded car but she and her car survived to drive another day.
Upon graduation, Mrs. Nichols loaded all of her worldly goods in her Mustang and set off to meet her mother in Charlotte, N.C. The car was so overloaded, she says, that the convertible top wouldn’t quite close. It came close so the recent graduate, using rope, tied the top down as best she could.
As she approached her destination the three-spoke steering wheel came off the steering column. “I shoved it back on,” she says, but decided at that point to have the Mustang towed the rest of the way to Charlotte.
The vehicle obviously had reached the end of the line. Mrs. Nichols’ mother and every other lucid person in Charlotte was in agreement that a junkyard was the best place for the car.
Instead, Mrs. Nichols, driven by her connection with the car and her father, had her Mustang trucked to her mother’s house in Virginia where it sat untouched for 11 years.
During that time she discovered that her convertible was one of 72,119 manufactured in the 1966 model year. It sold new in Pennsylvania with a base price of $2,653. With the reinforced frame typical of convertibles, the Mustang weights 2,650 pounds. She believes that she is its fourth owner.
In the spring of 1996 she bit the bullet and trucked her Mustang to R&J Automotive in Stafford for a total restoration that took two years.
She wanted her car put back in the condition it was in when it left the factory.
It was repainted the original white after all the rust and plastic damage filler were removed. “There were some surprises,” Mrs. Nichols says. The aqua interior was replaced with the rear bench seat and front bucket seats matching the dashboard covering and door panels. A color-keyed carpet covers the driveshaft hump, interrupted by the three-speed manual transmission gear-shift lever on the floor between the seats.
The cost of the restoration far exceeded estimates because she insisted on rechroming original parts rather than replacing them with less expensive reproductions.
When the project was complete in the spring of 1998, another problem arose. She had no garage and couldn’t let the car sit out exposed to the elements. “I rented a garage in Springfield,” she says.
While the restoration was progressing, life went on. She married Dave Nichols in the autumn of 1999. The Mustang languished in the rented garage while the newlyweds bought a house in Alexandria.
The first priority for the new homeowners was to demolish the old detached garage and replace it with a nice, new structure suitable for a restored 1966 Mustang convertible. That’s where the car now rests except on fair weather days when Mrs. Nichols takes her car out for exercise. She enjoys the nimbleness in handling provided by the 108-inch wheelbase and realizes the 140 figure on the speedometer is but wishful thinking.
The Mustang has been driven well over 100,000 miles, but you would never know it by its appearance.
“This is something worthy I wanted to do,” Mrs. Nichols says. “I’ll never sell it. There are too many memories attached to it.”
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