When his 17-year-old son, Jacob, decided to restore a vintage car, Richard Andrews began scoping out Chevelles, Camaros and Mustangs throughout the Dallas-Fort Worth area. They eventually found a Denton seller offering a ’66 Mustang Pony Coupe and drove up to see it.
While examining the car, Andrews cracked open the ashtray, pulled out an old insurance card, and found a surprise. It had a Lake Highlands address, the home of former resident Bill Sturgeon.
Andrews had met Sturgeon over the phone a few years earlier when calling his baseball uniform company in Terrell. So when Andrews saw Sturgeon’s name on the insurance card, he again rang up the uniform company.
“I called him the next day, and he said, ‘You’re kidding me. My three sons drove that car through high school and to Texas A&M and back.’ They had just sold it a year ago, and it’s been in the family for 20 years,” Andrews says. “So we brought it back to Lake Highlands.”
The Mustang was a decade old when Sturgeon’s father-in-law purchased it for his grandsons.
“Their granddad passed away in ’79 and never got to see any of the boys drive it,” Sturgeon says.
His oldest son, Stormy, was the first to take the wheel in 1980, when he received his driver’s license. Stormy drove it to and from Lake Highlands High School until he graduated. Sturgeon’s middle and youngest sons, Brady and Todd, also drove the Mustang during their years as Wildcats; they continued driving it until 1996.
Brady didn’t want the family to get rid of the car, Sturgeon says, so he kept it in his garage for years until finally selling it to the Denton man. That’s how Andrews and his son found it, a decade after the Sturgeon family had stopped driving it. Andrewsw immediately got to work.
“We put just hours and hours of work into this car, and there’s a ton of money in it, too,” Andrews says.
It took them five weeks to strip the car and rebuild it. They decided to paint it the original color, blue, but made it brighter and shinier than the midnight blue of the car’s first life. The Mustang’s resurrection pleased Sturgeon and his sons.
“We are very impressed,” Sturgeon says of the finished product.
Even though father and son poured blood, sweat, tears and lots of dollars into the Mustang, it’s not a display car, Andrews says.
“Jacob can drive it anytime he wants,” he says.
He admits, however, that it’s a little scary getting it out on the road. But it’s also an ego boost.
“I tell you,” Andrews says, “it turns heads. We get thumbs up at stop signs, and it’s great.”
