“But in July of ’66, I got a bad case of Malaria, and was sent to the hospital in Yakutsk, Japan, and was stationed back in Okinawa for my recovery. I got better but my time was getting short, meaning my four-year service term was going to be up in only three more months. So they sent me back to Vietnam for 90 more days. By October of 1966, there were about 150,000 troops in Vietnam. After my two tours of Vietnam, and some 24 months overseas, I was finally sent home and was honorably discharged in October 1966, receiving my separation pay of $1,600.”
As soon as Bob got back home, he began looking a new car. “I never had a car in my life,” he explained, and wanted to spend some of his Marine pay and savings on something sporty. Bob considered the ‘66 Pontiac GTO but couldn’t get a visit by one of his friends back in the spring of 1964 out of his mind. Bob remembered that one of his buddies who had transferred out of the service came back for a visit to the barracks, and he and his dad drove up in a brand-new 1964-1/2 Ford Mustang, “and the guys were going all over that car!”
Bob thought it was just a beautiful car, and from that point on he admitted getting "Mustang fever” that would last through the fall of 1966.
“I saw pictures of the new-for-1967 Mustangs, but never saw a real one at that point,” he said, “and I thought, ‘Boy! I’m gonna’ get one of those someday!’ If you were 23 years old back then, you wanted the Mustang. I wanted it because, well, the Mustang took my heart!”
So Bob went to his local Ford dealer, Broadway Ford -- right there on Broadway Avenue in Oakland -- in mid-October and asked about the newly redesigned ’67 Mustang Fastback. The 1967 Mustangs had just started appearing in Ford dealerships across the country on Friday, September 30, 1966. That meant it had been only two weeks since the cars were out in public, and Broadway Ford got just two of them in stock – but they’d already been sold! There were no new Mustangs for Bob to see on the showroom floor, so the salesman gave Bob a brochure. Bob picked out a fastback to order and was told it would take about three weeks to get it.
“They called me on the phone on November 8th and said, ‘Your car’s here; come down when you can and pick it up!’ so I headed straight to the dealership,” Bob remembered. “When I got to Broadway Ford to pick up my new Mustang, it was sitting over to the side in the garage area. When I spotted it, I thought, ‘Oh boy, what a beautiful car!’ It had whitewalls and only three miles on it. God, it was the most beautiful thing that I’d seen all my life!”
Bob’s car carried VIN number 7R02C133812, and featured the 2-barrel, 289 V-8 “C” Code engine, complete with the California-required Thermactor smog system, all tied to a 4-speed manual transmission. It was painted Dark Moss Green and was built at California’s San Jose (Milpitas) Ford plant. The car was actually delivered three days before the scheduled build date – one of the early-production ’67 Fastbacks built within the first two months of production for the West Coast. Loaded on a short-run car carrier, it was delivered after a 35-mile trip from the San Jose Ford plant to Oakland. Bob said he easily recalls that that date, November 8, 1966, because it was the same day that Ronald Reagan was elected Governor of California.
