The 1973 Gran Torino/Missing Photo Album-Scrapbook Story:
John Janovy, Jr.
Sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s, we bought a new smallish station wagon, a 1979 Mercury Zephyr, as a family car, but mainly as Karen’s car. A year or two later, I decided that it would be better in the long run if our good, relatively new, family car was not driven to Lake McConaughy, and Martin Bay beaches, over the washboard gravel roads between Cedar Point Biological Station and the lake, so I went into Ogallala to the Ford Agency and paid $600 for a well used, light blue, 1973 Ford Gran Torino station wagon. That would be Karen’s go to the beach car, and we left it out at CPBS during the winter.
The Ogallala part of this Gran Torino experience took place while I was CPBS director, mid-1980s. When I would go out to CPBS in May to start my summer’s teaching, research, and administrative duties, and before Karen and two of our children would come out, I would get into that station wagon, clean it out, make sure it was running okay, making sure that there were no mouse nests in it, get the oil changed, tires checked, etc. One summer I turned on the air conditioner and sure enough, there had been a mouse in the fan, and of course it got pulverized. That led to a highly educational day in which I took the inside all apart, removing the dashboard, etc., got out the fan, cleaned it off, and reassembled the interior. I also remember personally replacing brake shoes. And, when I eventually brought that vehicle back to Lincoln, did the tune-ups—points, plugs, timing, and once even a carburetor job (interesting; it had a large engine with a four-barrel carburetor)—I used it as a field car, and even driving it to Denver with several students to the American Society of Parasitologists annual meeting. When our son turned 16, that became his vehicle.
Now, fast forward thirty-eight years, to the Cedar Point Biological Station 50th Anniversary celebration, August 16-18, 2024, and the annual Rocky Mountain Conference of Parasitologists (RMCP) meeting at CPBS, September 5-7, 2024. As a contribution to that celebration, Karen spent the previous year assembling a truly massive, and highly archival, combination photo album and scrapbook, containing photographs going back to the early 1980s, pictures of staff and some students, class rosters, newspaper clippings from the 80s and 90s, etc. This was a truly major contribution to the historical record of that program, initiated in 1975, and the place where so many parasitologists, including those now in major academic and scholarly positions across the country, got their professional start. That album/scrapbook was a major hit, studied by attendees at the 50th Celebration, and later at RMCP. Then it disappeared.
When Karen and I went into Goodall Lodge for breakfast on Saturday morning, September 7, the album/scrapbook, product of Karen’s work for the past year, was gone. Subsequent efforts by CPBS staff to find it, have failed. It was not alive; it could not have flown off somewhere by itself. It was on the dining hall ping pong table Friday evening; by Saturday morning, it was gone. My e-mails to people I knew were at the RMCP meetings produced no information about what might have happened to it. After a couple of weeks of trying to trace it down, hassling the CPBS administration (who assured me they were looking for it everywhere, and I believe them), I finally admitted that I was as angry as I have ever been over something that has happened at UNL. As a result of that anger, I decided to reconstruct as much of that album/scrapbook as I could, and publish it. Thus I got into our files of photo negatives and started scanning. That effort will take a while, but in the meantime, here is another Gran Torino story. The connection to the CPBS photo album is finally admitted at the end of this piece.
Sometime during that vehicle’s time in Lincoln, the front passenger side door got bashed in. I don’t remember the details, but nobody was hurt and no police reports or insurance claims were filed. It just happened. The next summer, when I had it out at CPBS, I went over to the salvage yard at Brule, found a wrecked 1973 Gran Torino with a good door, bought the door, and replaced the one that was bashed in. The only problem was that the new door was yellow, and the rest of the car was blue. So, I painted the yellow door with some outdoor enamel that was fairly close to the right color. The photo attached to this story is black and white, but you can tell that the right front door has trim missing; I don’t know whether this pic was taken before or after I painted the door, but probably after.
Eventually the 1973 Gran Torino wagon started leaking transmission fluid, and I was not going to get it fixed. So I drove it to El Reno, Oklahoma, traded it in on a new Ford Taurus for Karen, and drove the Taurus home. I don’t remember all the family car situations during the late 1980s and early 1990s, but I know that at some point in our family history, we owned four Fords and/or Mercuries of various styles and ages, and that I did routine under the hood maintenance on all of them. Eventually, the family automobile supply sorted itself out, I bought a Dodge pickup, and I quit doing that under the hood stuff because my training, mainly on a 1955 Ford I owned when I was in the army, no longer applied.
The CPBS film files that I had at home included a roll of black and white negatives that had a bunch of pictures of the 1973 Gran Torino station wagon, and because that car was an interesting piece of our CPBS experience, and because I was so pissed at the fact that Karen’s archival work had disappeared, and because I was doubly pissed at that disappearance because there was no way in hell it could have walked off into the hinterlands by itself, I decided to write this piece and post a picture or two of that vehicle.
If anyone finds that photo album/scrapbook, let me know.
