Fords strut stuff in Kailua
By Walter Wright
Advertiser Staff Writer
From a 20-horsepower Model T to an 855-horsepower monster Mustang Cobra, it was a car-lover's candy shop in Kailua yesterday, where hundreds of residents tried to keep their fingerprints off a shiny collection of 135 of the finest Fords in Hawai'i.
Deborah Booker • The Honolulu Advertiser
Honolulu's finest were there as well, in the person of police Sgt. Brent Hume, who was showing off his Mustang Cobra police car, with the license plate frame reading, "Life is too short to drive a slow car."
Victor Weisberger, right, showed his 1914 Ford to Anthony Tavartes at the Mustang Madness car show yesterday in Kailua.
"It is how you drive the fast car," Sgt. Hume said.
Hume has had his 305-horsepower 1998 Cobra up to 130 mph once, when responding on a vacant H-3 in the middle of the night to a report of officers in trouble at a fight.
And it is clear that the sergeant has a soft spot for performance vehicles.
Asked if he shouldn't cite the nearby Boss Mustang for excessive noise when it rattled windows in the car show's "rumble contest," Hume said he probably should "but I love it too much."
The big Boss' roar drowned out the gentle putt-putt and occasional oogah from Victor Weisberger's 1914 Model T with flickering kerosene side lamps and acetylene gas headlights made of solid brass.
Weisberger, of Kailua, who is 20 years younger than his car, said he bought it in 1953 in Maryland for $375 and has taken good care of it ever since.
"It is a piece of history," Weisberger said of the four-door horseless carriage, "and it shows how the automobile evolved from the earliest years."
It cost about $700 when the world was on the brink of its first global war, bread was 5 cents a loaf, newspapers were a penny or two apiece, and gasoline was 12 cents a gallon, Weisberger said.
His "other car" is a Ford 2000 Ranger pickup, but Weisberger still takes the T out for a spin around Kailua, where he lives (and keeps the $12,000 collector's item safe from the salt air in a garage).
It's tricky to drive because you have to do a little dance on three floor pedals to shift gears, and one of the accelerators is a lever on the steering wheel post.
It's trickier yet to start. Weisberger, a retired Board of Water Supply safety officer, got a hernia cranking the car, so his son Fred, a St. Andrew's Priory teacher, is the official cranker now.
Fred is also the owner of a 1929 Hudson. "Dad brainwashed us," Fred said.
There was a little brainwashing going on at the other end of the Mike McKenna Ford lot where the sponsoring Aloha Mustang & Shelby Club of Hawaii had several Ford "Special Vehicle Team" cars on display.
"The SVE Boss 429 Mustang was developed after Chevy said it had a powerful Camaro and they were pretty sure Ford couldn't build anything like it," said O. John Coletti, chief engineer for Ford's Special Vehicle Engineering Department.
The big Mustang can do 0-60 mph in 1.9 seconds. "It can do 0-100 in 5.5 seconds, so you've got to get that first 60 mph out of the way in a hurry," Coletti said, grinning.
