I love garage sales, but I probably would love them even more if I lived in or around Detroit. Greg Steinmayer, who sent us the photos of the Maico 500 Sport Coupe for our perusal last week, said he found this batch of photos at a garage sale in Dearborn, in a box marked “Ford Motor Company Central Staff Photographic.” No captions came with the individual photos, so we have no idea who the people are in the photos, nor what they’re doing, though we can make pretty good guesses as to the latter.
For example, the 31 millionth Ford, above, was a 1945 pickup built on May 3, 1945. As James Wagner wrote in “Ford Trucks Since 1905,” milestone vehicles were typically passenger cars, but Ford was forced to recognize a pickup as its 31 millionth because the company still wasn’t building passenger cars in May 1945. Because it was built during the war, it had white-painted trim and a spare wheel without a tire. Interestingly, in other photos we’ve seen of the occasion, the sign proclaiming the truck’s provenance has the date lettered at the bottom, but in this photo, the date seems to have been whited out.
None of the faces seem to repeat from photo to photo, and the pictures seem to come from a wide range of years from about the late 1940s through the early to mid-1960s. If you recognize the people in the photos or the occasions for taking the shots, let us know in the comments.
