While ‘the little old lady from Taft’ doesn’t have quite the same ring to it as ‘the little old lady from Pasadena’ (who owned — according to songwriters Jan and Dean — a ‘brand new shiny red super stock Dodge’), Mark II and I were nevertheless on our way, 31 years ago, from Mark II’s place in Bakersfield to try to hunt down the little old lady from Taft who owned — according to several Bakersfield hot rodders — a very old, dull white, 1959 Cadillac coupe.
There were only a handful of days left before the hunt for T-Rex came to an end and I returned to New Zealand. After a month’s worth of effort and leads came to nothing, the Taft Cadillac had become the only remaining possibility and, based on what we’d been told, we knew that this last option was near enough to mission impossible. We had no name, no address, and not even the vaguest idea of where the car was.
However, popular Bakersfield hot rodding folklore had it that the car was in a carport and could be seen from the road if you looked carefully, and the property was located in a typical suburban neighbourhood. We hit the road early and wondered as we drove into Taft, with its population of around 6000 people, just how we might find this needle in a haystack. First stop: a gas station. We bought a map (remember them?) of Taft and a pen, and drove to the farthest corner of the town, where we began driving a methodical criss-cross pattern, street by street, crossing off the roads onalcoholics, we had to keep encouraging and berating each other to stay with the programme: we were looking for one car, and one car only. I wish now that I’d photographed all of those beautiful old distractions. Taft, like much of small-town California 30 years ago, was bleeding gorgeous old cars that didn’t go, or that needed tidying up, and of course now, with the luxury of hindsight, they were almost at giveaway prices.
