Gene Ferguson’s ’36 Ford

Another day, another relatively unknown custom. This one comes straight from the pages of the September, 1952 issue of Hop Up Magazine. Gene Ferguson was the owner, but the car was built by Montrose Body Shop. I had never heard of the shop and did a quick google search to find that a joint with the same name still exists in Montrose, South Dakota. The article in Hop Up doesn’t mention Gene’s hometown, so there is no way of knowing if google was on the right track or not.

Regardless of its breeding, this is an interesting car and one I’ve never seen published short of that old Hop Up book. In the early 1950’s, removing the running boards was a popular thing to do, but this often left a sort of awkward shape where the fenders meet the naked quarters. To combat this, Gene had a rolled body panel fabricated that sort of acts like a reduced running board that moulds cleanly into the fenders. As a result, you get the pontoon look of a fat fender car sans the boards, but you don’t have the awkward transition that so many of the early cars suffered from.

Even so, the more I look at this car the more I think it might have actually been built in South Dakota rather than California. There are two reasons for this suspicion of mine:

1. The car doesn’t have as athletic a stance as you would expect from an early California custom.

2. The continental kit. Even as a Texan, I’ve never got them and history proves that most Californian customizers didn’t either.

Still, great car… and how can you not love that front-end?