1974 Mustang II Mach I
(Johnny Kiss Me)

November 13, 2005

I'll try and make this brief, because lord knows I could go on and on about this car. This was my first car. I bought it when I was 18 in 1987, and a friend pronounced the JKM in the license plate to mean "Johnny Kiss Me", thus the name. I drove it through college, and then sold it shortly before I got married in 1993, when I lived in Eastern WA. By that time it was getting old and showing it's age, and spent more time riding on tow trucks than I could afford to deal with. But I cried when I saw the new owners drive it away because it was like an old friend. I never was much of a shutterbug, and so I had no pictures of it, just a model I built, and many fond memories.

Fast forward to 2005. I live in Western WA. I am a mustang nut. I have had two 1968 coupes, a 94 Cobra, a 95 GT Convertible, and currently have a 1984 SVO. I took the SVO to a Mustang show and had a great time, and came home thinking about how it's restoration was going to go. It needed paint, and I thought, why not change it's color to that fantastic yellow-gold color my first mustang was? That got me to thinking about Johnny again. I hadn't seen the car since shortly after I sold it. I had tried to find it a few times, hunted around for it when we went back to the East side to visit, but it seemed a hopeless task. It would help if I still had the VIN, but I didn't have any old records for it. Then it occurred to me that my insurance agent might still have the VIN on record, since I have always been with the same insurance company.

Sure enough, they had it on record, but it didn't decode correctly when entered into the VIN decoder on the Mustang II website. So I turned to the internet for help. Thus my adventure is laid out in this thread on the Mustang II Forum.

Mustang II Network - Message Forums - Looking for my old Mustang II

I'll cut to the end for those who don't have the patience to read through it - a few months later, after much detective work and some help from other Mustang enthusiasts, and a little long-distance dealing with the current owner, I dragged this home:

My old Mustang II, lost to me for 12 years. It is not in the best of shape, in fact I think the best thing for it will be a complete mechanical restoration and a fresh paint job. It looks a lot better in the pictures than it looks in person. The paint is sun-baked and it doesn't run. It had sat for years in the POs yard. But still, it is a sight for sore eyes. It is the holy grail for a Mustang enthusiast, my very first long lost Mustang, home again.

So this is my new project. I'll update this site as I have time with pictures of it's current condition, and then try to document the restoration for all those MII enthusiasts out there who will someday have to follow the same path.

I might as well say this while I am here. When I owned the car the first time I took a lot of flack from people who thought mustangs were built from 1965-1973, and then from 1979 on. Well, sorry to tell you, but without the MII, there would have been no 5.0L to rule the streets in the 80s and 90s. The MII was just the Mustang it needed to be during the gas crunch of the 70s. Not the greatest performance engines with the little four and six, but they weren't gas guzzlers, and it was a beautiful little car with great lines, a great interior, and excellent handling with the independent front end and rack and pinion steering (which was soon to be cut out and placed in nearly every hot rod built in the last twenty years). And everyone seems to forget that after the crunch had passed, the MIIs got the same 302 every other mustang has sported. Sure, in stock trim it was a little choked by emissions gear, but that wasn't the car's fault. Today you can hop up an MIIs 302 to burn up the pavement just like any other 5.0L. It is more than Mustang enough to be remembered in the family tree, and respected for the classic it is.

Stefrobrts@stephanies-mustang.com
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