Christmas - A Red Letter Day

[Old Henry]

I don't know about you but when I was a kid it was a major milestone in a car's life to reach 100,000 miles on the odometer. I think the understanding I had was that cars aged a year of human years for every 1,000 miles on the odometer such that, if a car reached 100,000 miles without an overhaul of the engine it was like reaching 100 years old for a human.

Well, anyway, yesterday, Christmas Day, was such a major milestone for "Old Henry", our '47 Fordor which we've owned since 1959. I knew the odometer was getting close to turning over but wasn't watching quite close enough to catch it on all 9's then all 0's but I glanced down when it had 1 mile on the odometer and stopped and took a picture for posterity. And to think that it happened on Christmas day - a double red letter day!



Here's the picture my dad took in 1962 during a cross country road trip with the family in the '53 Ford station wagon when it hit 100,000 miles. We actually all got out and pushed it the last 1/10th mile. (We didn't realize how long a tenth of a mile was.) I'm the tall one in the middle, age 10.



And the photo he took of the odometer with all 0's on it.



Nowadays it's nothing to run a car over 200,000 miles without any problems. In fact, all of our cars are well over that (except "Old Henry" of course. He's actually the "newest" car we have in mileage.) We don't even buy them until they are "well seasoned" with at least 100,000 miles on them.

Here's a picure I took when our '82 Dodge van hit 200,000 miles many years ago. (That's only 7 of our 10 kids. Three oldest were already gone. You can see why we've had 15 passenger vans for our road trips to every state we could drive to - 49 out of 50.)