“We hauled it down to North Carolina in boxes, and about five years after that we started to get serious about putting it together.” He disappeared after he tore our car apart, so a lot of it was in boxes (when we moved). “We actually hired a guy to restore it for us. “We raised six kids, so it just got put on the back burner,” Norma explained. The car made the trip to North Carolina when the couple retired, but by then, it was in rough shape and caught in the restoration purgatory that gearheads know too well. The Thunderbird stayed with Steven as he and Norma wed and raised their blended family of six children. ”I said, ’I’ll take it.’ I bought it sight unseen, a couple days later, I brought it home, and I’ve had it ever since.“ “He said ’I’m not giving that car to them for 200 bucks I’ll give it to anybody that wants it for 200 bucks,’“ Steven recalled. His boss at the time had a Honey Gold T-Bird with 40,000 miles on it that a local dealership was only going to give him $200 for on trade. Steven got his sports car in the mid-70’s while he was working at the Ford plant in Monroe. Dad had to have the luxury car, and I had to have the sports car.” “My father loved that car, and when he brings this (sales) book home with his new car that he bought, I look in the book and there’s this Honey Gold, 1965 Thunderbird. “Back when I was a little boy, about 11 years old, my father came home with a brand new ’65 Ford LTD Brougham,” Steven said. The ’65 Thunderbird was Steven’s dream car from the moment he first saw one in a Ford brochure. The Johnsons were not surprised to discover that the organizers of the show were interested in their ride, a low-number car with a rare paint scheme and a paltry 50,000 original miles on the motor. That was a quick six-to-eight weeks,” Steven said. “You send a bunch of pictures of the car in and then they are supposed to get back with you in six to eight weeks to let you know if they’d like to use your car as a feature display car.” “The lady I talked to said ’Do you have a nice T-Bird?’ I told her we have a really nice one, and she said to go back to the web page and go into this special place, (where) there’s an area to fill out an application. “We called there to see what to expect when we got there,” Steven said. The couple says they originally only intended to show their car with the rest of the general admission in the outside event space.

Ford celebrated the 65th anniversary of the Thunderbird nameplate at the show, which was postponed from its original July date due to COVID-19. The Monroe County residents recently took their ’Honey Gold’ T-Bird to Carlisle, Penn., where it was a featured car in the Carlisle Ford Nationals Car Show. Steven and Norma Johnson love their 1965 Ford Thunderbird.

65 thunderbird pictures