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MARTY CLEARA vintage car group broadens its focus to more recent makes and Lincolns and Mercurys.
TAMPA - One reason Joe Winkelmann co-founded the Ford Mercury Lincoln Club of Florida was his old Chevy.
Back in high school, in the 1950s in St. Louis, Winkelmann's '48 Chevy couldn't keep up with his friends' Fords. The only car he could beat in a race, he said, was another friend's Hudson.
He recalled that one time when he arrived at the finish line of a crosstown race, he found no one else there. He figured he must have gotten there first.
"All my friends had Fords," Winkelmann said. "It turned out I was so far behind they got tired of waiting for me and they all went somewhere else. The only car that came in behind me was a '48 Hudson."
Winkelmann has been a devoted Ford man ever since. He joined a Ford club in St. Louis, and started a local Ford club when he moved to Tampa.
Although the club that Winkelmann co-founded is now open to any owner of any Ford Motor Co. vehicle in the state, its original focus was much more narrow.
"We became a club in 1977, and at that time, we covered only '41 to '53 Fords," Winkelmann said. "We changed it in 1988 to include all Fords, Lincolns and Mercurys."
And even though the name identifies the club as a statewide group, and there are some members from other areas of Florida, it's pretty much a local organization.
"We're based in the Tampa Bay area," Winkelmann said. "We meet once a month, and we try to vary our meetings between the Tampa side and the St. Petersburg side."
A lot of car clubs are oriented toward maintaining, repairing and restoring cars. Monthly meetings are focused on speakers or presentations about specific issues related to the club's favored car, and people join at least partly to expand their network of sources for parts and information. Other clubs concentrate on highly organized road trips and other excursions.
That's not the case with the Ford Mercury Lincoln Club of Florida.
"We're basically a social club," Winkelmann said. "We meet every month at a restaurant or someplace where we can just get together and talk about cars."
It's also a relatively informal club, with dues of only $25 a year. Even though he's the co-founder and current vice president, Winkelmann isn't sure how many people belong to the Ford Mercury Lincoln Club of Florida.
"It varies between 20 and 38 members," he said.
Without checking records, Winkelmann said, it's kind of hard to say how many people are in any car club. That's because most clubs have a lot of members who rarely show up for club functions, or just show up for major events. There's a core group who turns out for anything club-related, and then there are others who are more casual about their membership.
"It's awfully hard to keep a club going these days," Winkelmann said. "No one wants to do anything."
Despite that, the Ford Mercury Lincoln Club of Florida manages to stage a successful judged car show every year, open to any Ford Motor Co. car that's at least 15 years old. Plans for this year's show are still in the works, but it's tentatively scheduled for early November at Courtesy Lincoln Mercury on State Road 60 in Brandon.
The club's traditions lie in vintage Fords, but it's been 16 years since the focus was broadened to include all Ford Motor Co. products. These days, members own everything from Model Ts to vintage Thunderbirds to plain-old, late-model Fords.
"We used to have a Model T that was our club car," Winkelmann said, "but the maintenance on it was eating us alive."
Winkelmann, who's retired from the insurance industry, has a fairly impressive collection of club-appropriate cars himself, including a 1950 Ford convertible, a full-custom 1950 Ford, a 1949 Fordillac roadster (a custom cross between a Ford and a Cadillac), a 1969 Mercury Cougar XR7 and a 1972 Ford Ranchero roadster.
Even his everyday car, a 1985 Mercury Cougar, is nearly an antique.
Some of the cars have been with him for decades. The full-custom 1950 Ford started with an old car he saw sitting in the Missouri woods, windows smashed and body badly dented, in the 1970s. It belonged to a mechanic, so the engine was in good shape. Winkelmann bought it, figuring he would use the engine in his own car and get rid of the body.
"But I dreamed about it that night, and I started fixing it up exactly the way I had seen it in my dream," he said.
Much to the dismay of his friends, Winkelmann had dreamed the car a mint green - specifically Volkswagen viper green - and he insisted on painting it that shade.
"Everybody told me I was crazy for painting it lime green," he said, "but it turned out to be a pretty cool color."
- For information about the Ford Mercury Lincoln Club of Florida, call Winkelmann at (813) 839-0241.