Celebrating 25 Years And Counting - Twenty Fifth Anniversary

In 1988 - we managed to get...

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In January of 1994, my telephone rang in Tennessee. It was Jeff Tann, a friend of mine and editor of Rod & Custom Magazine at the time. "Jimbo, Jerry Pitt is going to Mustang Monthly Magazine in Florida. John Dianna would like to talk with you about Mustang & Fords." Although I was flattered by the prospects of being editor of Mustang & Fords, I was not interested in moving back to Los Angeles. At the time, I was editor of the Mustang Club of America's Mustang Times and had that responsibility to consider.

A few days later, I was on a 757 bound for LAX and an interview with John Dianna. I was honored that Dianna thought of me, and terrified of what it would be like to follow in Jerry Pitt's footsteps. Jerry was very good - and had done an extraordinary job of turning Mustang & Fords around. It would be up to me to maintain the momentum. I would have that honor for five. It would be a slippery fast five years that would come to an end as quickly as it began.

The word "Restomod" was born on my watch, but the idea was nothing terribly new. Modifying classic Mustangs is as old as the Mustang itself. Enthusiasts were bolting do-dads onto Mustangs and other vintage Fords when factory air was still in the tires. Restomod was simply a more refined approach to building a modified Mustang. Chevy guys called it "Pro Touring". Some of the muscle car magazines called it "restified" or "rectification". We wanted a clean expression of what this thing called modifying was. Because "modifying" was such a dirty word at the time in the eyes of purists, I came up with "restomod". When I called Ron Bramlett at Mustangs Plus with the word, he liked it, and that was good enough for me. We kicked other words around. In the end, "restomod" stuck, becoming widely used throughout the industry. Ron liked the word so much he trademarked it as a Mustangs Plus brand name.

When I became editor of Mustang & Fords, the trend toward concours restorations was still very strong - and that's where we were as a magazine. We focused on the best restorers in the country - Bob Perkins, Drew Alcazar, Greg Donohue, and others who produced concours restorations. However, there were fresh rumbles of thunder from an increasing number of people who were personalizing classic Mustangs in ways that made these cars more fun to drive. This approach was certainly interesting to me. Danny Banh of D.B. Performance Engineering had built himself a Canary Yellow '65 Mustang hardtop sporting fuel-injected 5.0L V-8 power, five-speed, late-model Mustang seats, and big 16-inch wheels. The car was striking and it sounded good. It would wind up on our cover twice - and in our pages three times. Sadly, it was totaled in a bad accident during our last cover shoot of the car six years ago.

Around the time I met Danny Banh, I reconnected with an old friend from the 1980s - Ron Bramlett of Mustangs Plus in Stockton, California. Ron demonstrated his forgiving nature by letting me off the hook for misspelling his name when I was at Mustang Monthly Magazine in the mid-1980s. I spelled his name "Barnbutts" in error because that's how it looked like it was spelled in the letter I received from a reader who knew Ron. Not a soul in Northern California has ever let Ron forget either in 22 years.

In those first conversations with Ron, we talked about modified versus stock, and which had the bigger hook. We concluded the hobby was going nowhere if enthusiasts were going to be limited to factory original restorations. The stress of concours restorations ran a lot of people off who wanted to do more with their Mustangs. Ron introduced me to tastefully modifying a classic Mustang with elements that not only made them look better - but also perform better. Ron pushed for ideas that made Mustangs safer. He was also an idea machine bent on making classic Mustangs personal and distinctive.