“In the summer of 1958, I was traveling to Idaho Springs, Colorado, with my grandfather to visit his brother,” Fremont, Nebraska’s Doug Hartmann recalls. “We drove to Denver from there to pick up his new car. I didn’t know anything about cars then, but years later I could still remember riding on the front seat of a bright turquoise car with a funny looking grille; it was my first memory of the Edsel.”
When Doug started thinking about buying a classic car many years later, this memory caused him to take interest in the car with the funny grille: the 1958 Edsel. “I started reading about them, as well as checking for-sale ads and auctions listing Edsels,” Doug says. “I even joined one of the clubs just so I could get the newsletter.”
Doug learned that the design of the Edsel was placed in the hands of chief stylist George Walker, who was instructed to give the new line a “distinctive” look. Along with chassis and engine development for 18 models in four series—initially intended to fill
