Nearly 60 Years of Life With a Muscled-Up 1962 Ford Falcon Wagon

Maybe you rummaged around in a drawer and found your grandfather’s ancient cereal-box decoder ring. Or maybe it was a cardboard box in your attic, where you rediscovered your very first GI Joe, the 12-inch variety. The simple things that serve as gateways to a lifetime of flooding, happy memories. And they don’t necessarily have to be toys and trinkets. As a case study we direct your attention to this 1962 Ford Falcon two-door station wagon. It’s been in the same North Carolina family for close to 60 years now, a period crammed with good feelings, from giving it a wash outside the carport to heading for the coastline with the whole brood piled in back.

That’s why this Falcon wagon is still in the Cannon family, which plucked it off a used-car lot in Charlotte and not just maintained it, but also made it a measurably better car. How so? By having a new engine built around a larger, 200-cu.in. inline-six block that used the top end of the Falcon’s original engine. In Cannon family history, the Falcon only lasted five years as a daily driver, but it was an unassailable part of that heritage by then. It’s been maintained carefully in a mostly pleasant climate. The Falcon retains its original paint today, along with its original pasted-on pinstripes. It’s been upgraded, cosmetically, with fender skirts and a set of later-model wheel covers for its 13-inch wheels. And it’s still driven, mainly to shows. You see, in the Cannon family, the patriarch is a diehard Falcon fan.

“It’s a base car, with factory paint, an NOS interior and headliner, and the bottom end of a 200 engine,” said Jeff Cannon, who now preens the Falcon from his home in Granite Quarry, North Carolina. “We bought it in June 1965, and it was our daily driver until 1970, when my father got a Ford Crown Victoria. It was my first car in 1983 when I got my driver’s license.”

We can learn two things from this quote: The Cannon family is strongly pro-Ford, except for the fact that Jeff briefly owned a Chevrolet in a dispute with his father over the proper care and use of the Falcon. And that when it comes to Falcons, it’s Jeff’s father, Wayne Cannon, who has the final say, very much befitting a car guy who just turned 84. Make no mistake: The Falcon’s at Jeff’s house but Wayne, from Kannapolis, North Carolina, is the reason it’s there in the first place.

“In 1965, I was driving a 1951 Chevrolet and a 1950 four-door Plymouth, and I decided to get rid of the Plymouth and get another vehicle,” recalls Wayne. “I was living in Charlotte, and I found this wagon sitting on a used car lot. I purchased it and sold the Plymouth at a Ford dealer. The car had belonged to a guy who was a truck driver and it had 30,000 miles on it, so it was a local car.

“We were a family then, so I needed a family vehicle, plus the Falcon was a nice-looking car that caught my eye,” continues Wayne. “I bought it for $950 with $300 down. I still have the documents for that. I had never owned a station wagon before. Other than the wife taking the kids to the beach, that’s about as far as we drove it once we moved to Kannapolis. We’d make a big pallet in the back with blankets, put the kids back there, lower the back window and it wasn’t a problem until you stopped, and exhaust fumes started coming in through the back window.”

Today, the car’s a star–it’s been featured in the catalog of Falcon components from Dennis Carpenter Ford Restoration Parts, located just down U.S. 29 from Kannapolis. But it didn’t start out that way. In 1962, Ford produced 396,129 copies of the first-generation Falcon in the third year of the model’s production, with no breakout available as to trim and body styles. In 1962, the Falcon was offered with two sizes of Ford’s third-generation OHV inline six-cylinder engine, displacing 144 and 170 cubic inches, respectively, with a maximum of 101 horsepower.

“I’m not mechanically inclined, and I started having some kind of trouble with the engine,” Wayne says. “So, I took it to a mechanic, and he said that whatever was wrong with it, he’d have to rebuild the bottom part. That was in 1970. He said I could get a 200, and he put that in there and used the top part of the 170 that was in there at first. I have no idea where he got the 200, and I have a copy of the work order, but now, there’s a lot of difference in the horsepower.”

How much? The 200 was first introduced in 1963, in time to be installed in the first-generation Ford Mustang, with slightly bigger bore and stroke measurements than its 170-inch sibling. An impressively robust engine, its cast crankshaft ran in seven main bearings beginning in 1965. The Cannons’ engine has never been on a dyno, but as produced by Dearborn, was rated at 120 horsepower when new. Today, the bigger six has no trouble motivating the Falcon through its Ford-O-Matic automatic transmission.

“I’m pretty happy with it,” Wayne says.

Over the years, Wayne gradually became a Falcon fan, and passed the wagon on to Jeff to drive. As Jeff reminisced, “I got my license and drove the car for maybe six months. A 21-year-old station wagon was not a cool car for a teenager at that time, plus parents didn’t like a guy picking up their daughter in a station wagon. One day, after about six months, a hubcap fell off and I didn’t know it. And Dad said, you’re not driving that car anymore because of that hubcap, so I went out and bought a 1969 Camaro.”

The disagreement emerged because at that time, the Falcon was still decidedly Mom and Dad’s car at their home. Wayne unfailingly washed the Falcon every week, waxed it on schedule, and generally kept it spiffy even as the base interior materials started to deteriorate. In 1996, Jeff and Wayne obtained a supply of NOS vinyl materials and fully restored the interior, adding a new headliner at the same time, with Jeff saying that the interior’s condition remains “perfect” today. The work was done at George’s Trim Shop in Kannapolis. The interior door panels remain original, the knobs were replaced with Dennis Carpenter pieces about two years ago, and a set of engine gauges now reside beneath the dashboard. Under the hood, the 200 boasts a chrome rocker cover, also from Dennis Carpenter.

Wayne still has the original Falcon hubcaps from 1962, which he replaced with units from a 1962 Falcon Futura that he grabbed once he became a Falcon enthusiast in earnest. “The pinstripes are actually tape,” Wayne explained. “I found the skirts from a person in Winston-Salem who messed in Falcon parts, and I bought them from him. I was trying to find accessories that would fit on the car. I put the little chrome half-moons, we call them, on the headlamps.”

“Dad was in the Navy, and he’s always been very particular about the cleanliness of things, so there wasn’t a lot for me to do with the car,” Jeff said. “Later on, Dad had a big building constructed out back, and he stored the Falcon in there for a number of years. Then he brought it out, had it on the road a few more years, and then it went back into storage for another 10 or 12 years. It still has original paint thanks to Dad’s great care.”

Cars like this get noticed, especially once the owner turns into something of an authority of the marque. Time passed, and Wayne kept acquiring early Falcons. One of them was a 1962 Ford Ranchero that, according to Wayne, “went to pot.” Next came a 1961 Falcon that went to Wayne’s brother-in-law, who crammed in a 289-cu.in. V-8 much more than the little bird had stock. Wayne bought that car back, but it eventually experienced an engine failure. Undaunted, Wayne then got a 1963 Falcon Futura hardtop, which he personally restored, and which has been a show winner in North Carolina for years. So, it’s no surprise that Wayne headed to the huge AACA AutoFair show at Charlotte Motor Speedway.

“The wagon was just a car that I liked to start with, but in 1999, I took the car to AutoFair and accumulated some old car parts,” Wayne said. “When I came back, there was a little sticker on the windshield. Someone who represented the Falcon club put it there, so I joined the club. It’s the Carolina Chapter of the Falcon Club of America, which is now based in Lincolnton. I was the chapter president for seven years.”

Fast forward a couple of decades, and the Falcon, still riding on impossible-to-find 13-inch whitewalls, was back at the speedway, where Jeff and Wayne had taken to showing the Falcons together. “The AutoFair officials came by and started looking at Dad’s ’63, which was in contention for Best Restoration by Owner. Then they started talking about the wagon. So, they ended up giving the wagon the Most Original Unrestored for the meet, because they couldn’t award two cars from the same club.

“The wagon is excellent to drive,” Jeff beamed. “We had the carburetor rebuilt last year and it starts right up, runs like a top. It has manual steering, which is why there’s a knob on the wheel.”

“When I get in the wagon and mash the gas, the 200 is faster than my ’63,” Wayne said. “Plus, it’s bulletproof.”

Owner’s View

“My Mom drove us back and forth to school, and I think of her hands on the steering wheel. And Dad drove us around for several years, using the knob on the wheel. Sitting in the carport, there’s a couple of little dings on it from things hitting it when my brother and I were playing outside. We used it for going to the beach; going to ball practice; diving into the back through the tailgate. It has an ahooga horn that the guys thought was nerdy, but the girls liked it. It just has a lot of memories for me. The thing Dad’s most proud of is the exhaust tips that came off a 1940s Cadillac. It doesn’t have dual exhausts. We keep the other tip painted inside.” – Jeff Cannon