[Marshall V. Daut]

Without digging into my back issues of "The Victoria Bustle" again (and there are a LOT of them!), I seem to recall a photo or two of surviving club members' softback Vickies with indented firewalls (NOTE: I originally mistakenly typed "flat firewalls" here. I have corrected that by changing it to "indented"). There was a transition period when the softbacks were being phased out by the newer steelbacks beginning in about May, 1931. Apparently some (who knows how many 90 years later?) of the now-obsoleted softback bodies still on hand were fitted with the shipment of newly-introduced indented firewalls (intended for the new steelback body) during this transition timeframe of May-June, 1931. This is, of course, typical of Ford = use up existing stocks before introducing the newer part. My guess is that the supply of flat firewalls in the Murray plant was exhausted, so to keep things moving along, the newly-arrived indented firewalls were installed. There were about 37,000 Vickies made. As I recall from an older Victoria Association's body number list, the break between softbacks and steelbacks was almost in the middle at about body #18,500. This is close enough for our purposes, isn't it?
By the way, George DeAngelis was only partially correct in his book "The Model A The Way Henry Built It" in saying that the customer had a choice of either the softback or the steelback Vicky. That makes it sound as though both styles were being made concurrently and all the customer had to do during 1931 was to choose which one he wanted. This would only be true if a dealer had BOTH models on hand during the transition period and could offer either a softback or a steelback Vicky to the customer for a short time. But unless a softback version sat unsold for a long period of time after the steelback Vicky production took over, it would be misleading to maintain that both versions could be ordered at any given time during the Victoria's production run.
Marshall