Better late than never as a Mustang collector

Typically, the collector-car gene is passed down from father to son. But there are times when it seems to work the other way around.

That was the case with Rick Lacey and his father, Ray.

Rick had bought a Mustang as a young man and enjoyed it for several years. But it took a while for his dad to notice just how much fun his son was having with the car.

“Until I retired, I didn’t really get into it,” says Ray, now 89 and the owner of not one, but three, vintage 1960s-era Mustangs.

He remembers the furor the Mustang created when it was introduced as a mid-year model in 1964 at the New York World’s Fair.

“I didn’t pay much attention to it at the time,” he recalled.

It was sometime in 1973 that the idea of owning a Mustang finally took hold with him. He had a chance to buy a Raven Black 1966 Mustang convertible in need of a little work.

“It was a local car and I overhauled it first thing before I started on the body. We put new floorboards in it — does that tell you anything?” he said.

The rocker panels were also replaced, but outside of that, most of the paint was saved. Even the original off-white top was in good enough condition that it was saved.

The convertible retained its 289 V-8 engine and factory automatic transmission. Its dual exhaust system was replaced, but the factory wire wheel hub caps and 14-inch wheels remained in place.

“Bob Zimmerman, a friend of mine, and I started going to car shows together and we never missed a one,” Lacey said. After that, he said, “It was always Mustangs, I always had that in my mind.”

He later added a 1967 Springtime Yellow Mustang hardtop to his stable, also a 289 automatic, accented with a black vinyl roof. He left it basically the way he found it.

“I never molested it in any way, it’s just like it came from the factory. We would drive one on one weekend to a show and the next weekend, the other one,” he said.

His wife, Clara, also became a regular at area car shows and they even ran their own car show for 25 years in the city park near their home.

At one point, Ray Lacey expanded his horizons just a bit, deciding he would like to add a Cougar, Mercury’s cousin to the Mustang, to his collection.

“I shopped for about a year, pretty much all over the country,” he said. But he found Cougars in decent shape are much harder to locate than Mustangs.

“I’ve really enjoyed Mustangs,” he said.

But if he was going to have another Mustang, he wanted something a bit sportier.

“I saw this one in the paper. It came from eastern Kansas,” he said, indicating the sleek Vintage Burgundy 1967 Mustang fastback parked alongside the other two Mustangs.

“I told my wife, `I’ve been hunting for one of those, let’s jump in the truck and go see what it is.’ We went and looked at it and I drove it. It had a lot wrong with it, but I told him I would go home and think about it. Three or four days later, I got ahold of a buddy with a trailer and we went and got it.”

He brought home a 4-speed car. The engine was in bad shape, so he found another block and bored it out to 302 cubic inches, added a Holley double-pumper 4-barrel carburetor and a mild RV-style camshaft. Cobra valve covers and a chrome Monte Carlo bar were added to the engine bay package.

“It’s not the standard clutch in it, it’s got the smoothest clutch you ever saw,” he said. The transmission was gone through and freshened up and he and a grandson did the body work required to bring the fastback up to snuff.

Lacey took the burgundy Mustang to Chris Carlson in Mulvane to match the existing paint and was thrilled with the end result. The car now sports a white stripe down each rocker panel and a set of American Racing wheels and BF Goodrich T/A radial tires.

Now that he has a more muscular Mustang, has he ever gotten a little carried away with it?

“Oh, I hot-rodded it a little bit, but I’ve never been picked up by the cops,” he grins.

On one occasion, he took his wife and sons to Arkansas City for lunch and couldn’t resist demonstrating the power on tap.

When Clara got out of the car, she told him, “I’ll take those keys.”

“She shut me down,” he admitted.

“He was just showing off,” she said.

“I just like to take it out on nice days and drive it,” Ray said.

Next May, they will celebrate their 70th wedding anniversary, maybe with a cruise to the ice cream shop in their muscular Mustang fastback.

This story was originally published January 3, 2017 at 7:07 PM with the headline "Better late than never as a Mustang collector."