Been a while since I last posted here. We've been kind of busy. A while back I had posted that my next door neighbor had recently bought a 1976 low mileage Maverick that was virtually rust free and a great restoration project. This Maverick had been graced with a Comet nose from what I'm guessing was the result of a front end collision at some point in it's life. With the weather still remaining fairly decent, Dale, my neighbor and I have been scouring the local salvage yards for a few needed front end parts to make the car all Maverick again. One such part was a front filler panel. We had all gone junkyarding a few weeks ago and found a very nice one, but none of us were sure if the car had the correrct one or one from a Comet front end. For whatever reason we did not take the part off and bring it home. Of coarse, that was one of the parts we needed. So the next day our neighbor went back to the salvage yard by himself to get it. Now a little info on our neighbor. He's in his late sixties and diabetic. Not in the greatest of health, but not much slows him down either. After he had been gone for a few hours we started to get worried. It didn't take that long to take off that part. By late afternoon we were REALLY getting worried. Then the phone rang. It was his daughter calling to tell us that our neighbor had been taken by chopper to the hospital for severe chest pains while he was at the salvage yard. She needed the phone number for the salvage yard so she could go get his truck. No sooner did she hang up the phone our neighbor called us from the hospital to tell us he was going to be allright. He had a heart attack while at the hospital. He flatlined during the heart attack. They brought him back and installed a stent in one of his arteries ( which was 95% blocked ). But most important of all, he got the filler panel off the Maverick at the salvage yard! That was all he cared about at the time. He was getting that damn filler panel off even if it killed him, which it nearly did! He's fine now. It's like nothing ever happened to him. We felt terrible about what happened to him, but he laughs about it now. He wasn't giving up on that filler panel no matter what. The running joke now is that he owns the worlds most expensive 1976 Ford Maverick front filler panel EVER. Five large for the chopper ride plus the hospital stay plus the procedure to install the stent and I think you can all do the math. He's really into these cars now and nothing is going to keep him from getting the parts that he needs to restore this car. Now that's either dedication or just plain crazy. I'm leaning towards a little of both.
