Most 12-year-old boys would be excited to get a model of a race car. Orange native Victor Wickersham got more than a replica when he was that age. He got the legendary Wickersham 999 Ford Mustang drag-racing champion.
The 1964 1/2 (yes, that’s the year model) won 40 out of 42 races across the country. The racer was a special experimental model Mustang. Wickersham said Ford built only 11 of the cars and only five still exist. The Wickersham 999 Mustang is now in a car museum in Ames, Oklahoma.
Victor is the son of the late Charles Wickersham, who owned the Orange Ford dealership for decades. He said his father gave him the Mustang after retiring it from the racing circuit. He was 12 at the time. He said he drove it on tracks, but not around town. “It wasn’t street legal,” he said.
Victor was a kid when his father had a racing team with Clester Andrews of Orange as the driver. Besides the Mustang, the Wickershams had a Ford Galaxy 500 and a Ford Thunderbolt. “I was a 9-year-old little boy getting to go to the drag strips with my dad,” he said. He even traveled to a national championship in Los Angeles.
“Everybody’s dad didn’t own a Ford dealership. I was really blessed,” he said.
The Galaxy 500 is also in the Oklahoma museum. Wickersham said his father years ago gave them to a man who preserved cars. The Mustang “belongs in a museum where it’s safe,” he said.
The Mustang had a 427 high riser engine. “It set all kind of records,” Wickersham said. The car had a 9.7 run on a drag strip quarter-mile at a speed of 149 mph.
The Thunderbolt may still be somewhere. “We had information that car might be in someone’s garage in Victoria (Texas),” he said.
Drag racing was at the heights of its popularity in the 1960s when the Wickersham cars competed. Wickersham said the special Mustang was designed to compete with Chrysler Hemi engine of the time.
The young Wickersham was such a Ford enthusiast that he made his first car sale to his second grade teacher, Mrs. Matthews. “My dad gave me a $25 commission,” he said.
But his first job wasn’t at Wickersham Ford. Federal labor law prohibited children from working around equipment like jacks at the dealership. He worked at Sprad’s Boat Town down the street rigging boats when he was 11, 12 and 13. Later, he worked in the shop at and other jobs at the Ford dealership.
Wickersham graduated from Stark High School in 1975. Today, he sells Fords in Baytown, working with a man who worked for his father.
Getting a race car wasn’t the only gift from his father. He said his father gave him a lake, Toledo Bend Reservoir, which is now one of the best bass fishing sites in the country.
Charles Wickersham was on the board of directors of the Sabine River Authority for many years and pushed to get the reservoir built. He was president of the board when the lake was officially opened by governors of Texas and Louisiana in 1969.
“If it wasn’t for my dad, that lake wouldn’t have been built,” he said.
Victor Wickersham recalls his father hosting politicians at the family farm in Bon Wier. The Texas leaders he remembers at the farm include Lyndon Baines Johnson, Governor Preston Smith and U.S. Representative Charlie Wilson.
“You hear the saying about ‘you can teach a man to fish.’ My dad actually built me a lake and taught me how to fish,” he said.
-Margaret Toal, KOGT-
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