Junkyard Find: 1964 Ford Fairlane 500 4-Door Sedan

The 1960 model year saw a trio of brand-new compact Detroit cars ( the Corvair, Valiant and Falcon) appear to do battle with increasingly popular small imports. Sales were strong, and the Detroit Big Three plus the Kenosha One got busy preparing midsize cars to slide between the compacts and the full — sizers. Ford's entry was the Fairlane, which debuted as a 1962 model. Here's one of those first-generation Fairlanes, found in a self-service boneyard just south of Denver, Colorado.

There's a lot of great vintage stuff at Colorado Auto & Parts right now. Within a row or two of today's Junkyard Find, there's a 1965 Fairlane 500 U.S. Army staff car, a 1965 Dodge D-200 U.S. Army pickup, a 1971 MGB-GT, a 1948 Dodge sedan, a 1947 Dodge coupe, a 1969 AMC Rambler, a 1951 Studebaker Champion, a 1959 Princess DM4 limousine, a 1958 Edsel Citation, a 1951 Kaiser sedan, a 1959 Citroën ID19, a 1963 Chrysler Newport and dozens of first-generation Mustangs and Cougars.

This car had a snow-encrusted oil painting by Stone, resting on the trunk lid when I arrived.

The Fairlane name was lifted from Henry Ford's estate in Dearborn, Fair Lane, which itself was named after the street in Cork, Ireland, where Henry's grandfather was born in 1804.

As has been the case with so many model names, the Fairlane designation began life as a trim level title for the full-sized Ford line. This began in 1955, with the Australians grabbing the name for use on a separate model in 1959.

The build tag tells us that this car was assembled at Ford's Kansas City plant on July 14, 1964 (the day Jaxques Anquetil won the Tour de France). It was painted in Vintage Burgundy with beige interior, had a two-barrel 289-cubic-inch V8 bolted to a three-speed Cruise-o-Matic automatic transmission and was sold through the Denver sales office.

I can't decipher the shadow of the long-departed dealership badge, but I'd wager it came from somewhere along the I-25 corridor between Albuquerque and Cheyenne.

This dusty sticker on the dash is a piece of obscure 1990s Denver history. Concentrated Evil, a local grunge metal band, appears to have been active during the middle part of the decade.

I think there's a fair chance