The last thing one expects from enjoying a car magazine is to feel like they're back in high school reading a homework assignment. We can appreciate this fact as well as the next guy so when we use the expression "isomorphic correspondence" to describe the process that causes a person to form an attachment to a certain type of automobile, please allow us to explain.
Isomorphic correspondence, simply put, means nostalgia. When we see an image, hear a combination of musical notes, or smell a certain fragrance, we interpret its meaning based upon our past experiences and memories.
For former Huntington Beach, California, resident Steve Early, the sights, sounds, and fondest memories are of his younger days riding to the beach in the family's trusty old Ford woodie wagon. As the years and decades passed, Steve and his wife, Jeanette, found themselves in a position to revisit the place in time with the memories they loved the most. Steve set his sights on tracking down a woodie wagon. After a three-year search, the quest landed in New Jersey where Steve located a fully restored '40 Ford Deluxe station wagon. In 1940 there were 8,730 Deluxe and 4,469 standard-model Ford station wagons manufactured. As collector cars go, these numbers do not make '40 Ford woodies a rare automobile, but thanks to the nature of the wagon's wood construction, they are quite scarce in the 21st century.
Right out of the box (or should we say crate?) Mother Nature's elements had it in for woodie wagons. If owners didn't keep up a regimen of proper maintenance consisting of fresh varnishing and paying attention to rain water drainage, the cars were extremely prone to rotting out. Adhering to the philosophy of, "You build the best cars by starting with the best examples," Steve was willing to pay top dollar for his woodie. In 1940 at $950, the Ford Deluxe station wagon held the highest sticker price of the 1940 model lineup. In the year 2000, Steve paid $45,000 for his car. It's hard to say if the celebrity connection really has any bearing on how much of a premium one has to pay for a car, but Steve's woodie does have an interesting story behind it.
In 1983, his '40 Ford woodie wagon served as a backdrop to the Beach Boys' third-annual Independence Day concert. This was to have been the third year in a row the Beach Boys appeared on the Washington Monument grounds for the event, except then-U.S. Secretary of Interior James Watt had the Beach Boys banned on the grounds that rock concerts drew "an undesirable element." In response to the ban, the concert venue was moved to Atlantic City, New Jersey. After the show, four of the original Beach Boys autographed the woodie's left and right side rear insert panels along with its tailgate. Later that year, on November 18, James Watt left office early and then Beach Boys' drummer Dennis Wilson tragically drowned on December 28.