... (continued from page 5)...

March 4, 2006...

One evening, A while back now,  last Pearl Harbor Day in fact,
I got an email from Ralph in California.  No, he's not a surfer, just a tbird nut like the rest of us.
Ralph told me that he used to belong to the Orange Co. Mustang club,and a few of them went out to see a '69 Shelby a guy had for sale. 

He says "I remember driving out to the SF Valley to this house with this 10ft high fence
that looked like a fort. Once inside I saw all these cars he had in various areas of the back yard.
He had the clone ITALIEN covered up I asked him what it was and he uncovered it and told us it was a Thunderbird Show car, he lead us to believe it was the real thing.
I remember going into his house and seeing he was rebuilding a motor on the living room table.
I spoke with Rick that evening for over 2 hours.  I should say Rick spoke for over 2 hours, when he found out I had purchased the ITALIEN he couldn't stop talking about it.
Rick had the ITALIEN in his shop back in 1974 for some repair work.
Rick was and still is an avid Bulletbird enthusiast and was known in the area for his repair work on them.

The ITALIEN had just been purchased from Dale Robertsons Gardener, William,
by it's now third owner, Joe, in December of that year.
Joe brought the car to Rick for some tune up work.
The ITALIEN is equipped with a tri-power and not a lot of people are comfortable adjusting the linkages on them.

Rick is the person who sent me most of the pictures on Page 3.
Rick told me he became sort of obsessed with the car in the mid 60's when he would spot it driving around on the streets in the Los Angeles area.

He would try and follow it to see if he could get a close look at it and the couple times he did that he ended up losing it up in the Hollywood Hills area. He never did get a close look at it...

until that day in December when Joe pulled into his lot with the ITALIEN.

Rick was so excited he could hardly talk to Joe.
Joe told Rick what he needed done to the ITALIEN and left the car with Rick. He had it in his shop for nearly two weeks, not because it took that long to do the tune up, but because Rick was busy photographing the car and it's unique details and taking measurements of everything because he wanted to build his own ITALIEN,  a CLONE! (This was before "cloning" was in vogue)

He told me details about the car that most people would never even have noticed,
but because of his obsession, and his knowledge of bulletbirds, he noticed everything.

Like the fact that the red leather interior was glossy, not dull like leather typically is. He said "It's like they shellaced it".  You can see how shiny the seats are in the interior pictures on PAGE 6.  He noticed that the rear seat cushions had "deep groves between the bolster and center cushion that you could put your hand down into", and the air conditioning in the car was added later by either Dale Robertson or William.

He told me things like "in the original press pictures of the car there is the bird emblem on the back of the deck lid, but it is not there now, and it must have been glued on as there are no holes in the fiberglass deck lid and no evidence that they were there and then patched up".

He told me the headline was also red leather, the front seats have the 63 trim on them (remember, the car started life as a '62 model) and that the ITALIEN dash is pictured on page 9 of the 1963 Thunderbird Owners Manual.

You can compare that picture with the actual ITALIEN dash picture below and see that they are very similar in design. I believe the dash pictured in the owners manual is the '63 walnut design dash that was in the Landau, maybe someone can confirm that and send me a picture or two.

When Rick was finally done documenting the car, and with the tune up, he called Joe to come and pick it up.

Rick started building his clone shortly thereafter and I hope to have some pictures of it here in the future. It sounds like he has the roof built. He used an early Rambler roof. He is still, to this day, working on the clone. It's been a slow process, something like 32 years...