Louis Franck waited more than 32 years to relive a bit of his youth behind the wheel of a 1968 Mercury Cougar. He may have waited even longer if it hadn’t been for his wife Roslyn.
“I was actually looking for my old Cougar. I had the VIN number and everything. I kept looking and couldn’t find it,” says Franck, a resident of Baltimore. “Finally my wife says, ‘If you can’t find your car, find a replacement.’ I just about fell out of my chair!”
A while later, after Louis had found a car and was wavering over whether he should finally pull the trigger and buy it, his wife stepped in again. “I had been on the phone with the guy who owned it up in Long Island,” Louis recalls. “I was sitting around now knowing if I was going to buy it, and my wife says, ‘If you don’t get back on the phone and buy that car right now, you’re going to regret it, just like you did with your first car!’ So basically I give my wife full credit for buying this car. It was all because of her.”
Franck’s affection for the handsome Mercury pony cars began back in 1967 when he was in the market for new transportation and wound up getting a 1968 Cougar that he drove until about 1976. “I loved the heck out of that car. It was a base 302 model, Diamond Blue … But I got married, got a mortgage, had kids, had bills … The car had some serious miles on it and needed some serious repairs, so needless to say the car had to go,” Franck recalls. “I always thought about getting another one, and then in about ’07 I told my wife that I wanted my old Cougar back. I looked all around and posted on the internet that I was looking for it, but I never found it.
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