Junkyard a Haven for This Collector’s Love: the Edsel

LeRoy Walker drives a rusty pickup truck over the 37 acres he owns, bragging about his hundreds of junk cars, a few faded school buses, a broken concrete mixer and 152 Edsels.

Huh? 152 whats?

Walker has perhaps the nation’s largest collection of Edsels, the car that’s synonymous with disaster. He loves them.

“A lot of this older stuff is much superior over the new stuff,” he says, at his junkyard 60 miles northwest of Bismarck. “A lot of these older cars are worthless, but save it and in a little time they’ll be worth plenty of money.”

The Edsel, named after Henry Ford’s son, was plugged for 18 months before it went on sale in 1957. It featured the latest advances--push-button shifting, electric windows and car seats, a compass, thermometers and a radio that searched for stations.

Ford predicted sales of 290,000 in the first three years. But in 1960, production stopped at just over 100,000. Some blamed a recession and high costs; others said the hype didn’t match the car.

Walker started fixing cars when he was a teen-ager. Now the 50-year-old mechanic makes a few bucks on the side by selling hard-to-find Edsel parts around the world or using them for restorations.

“It was intriguing,” he says of his decision to collect Edsels. “It was just a totally different kind of a new challenge at the time.”

So far, he’s won at least two dozen awards for his remodeling.

Walker earns most of the praise from the Edsel Owners Club. The group, which holds annual conventions, has 1,500 members in the United States, Australia and Europe.

Walker enjoys the club’s conventions, hitting the highway in his off-yellow 1958 Edsel Citation convertible with his wife, Ila.

Edsel Henry Ford, a founding member of the owners club, jokes that he bought an Edsel “because of my name, and I never understood why anyone else would buy one.”

Ford, who is not related to the auto-making family, paid $2,250 in 1959 for his first Edsel, pulled right off the showroom floor. Today, it’s got a new engine and 130,000 miles.

“It runs like a top,” he says, at his home near Oakland, Calif. “I haven’t had the heart to drive it. It just looks too good.”

Ford takes insults about the Edsel lightly but defends the car as a high-quality Ford product. He’s had 13 of them.

“The Edsel was no better or no worse than any other car of its time,” he says.

Why would anyone want to collect cars known as flops?

“Why does a guy buy a Mercedes-Benz?” Ford replies. “It’s because you’re trying to say this is part of me. I like it. It’s just fun to talk about it, and it says I am somebody.”