Recently I saw a restored tractor painted some outlandish color far from the shade the manufacturer applied back in the day. My first thought was of Henry Ford, who famously said, “any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants, so long as it is black.”
Ford was motivated by the desire to keep his famed assembly line as simple as possible. Stopping the line to accommodate a color change was, to Ford’s mind, an unimaginable waste of time and money. But by 1926, he caved, offering the Model T in three additional shades: green, maroon and gray. Next thing you know, refrigerators became available in shades of avocado and harvest gold.
When tractor restoration began to go a bit Hollywood, some folks couldn’t get enough glossy paint. Prizing the patina of time, others massaged linseed oil into original sheet metal. “It’s only original once,” they said. For a time, the restored vs. original debate became a bit of a pickle, the kind of topic a conflict-averse person would avoid.
Online, of course, fools rush in where angels fear to tread. Everyone there has an opinion and is more than happy to share it. When my husband stumbled into a hornet’s nest of comments centered on some hapless collector’s decision to post a picture of an old truck painted an unusual color, it didn’t take him long to get to the heart of the matter. “There’s just one thing to remember,” he said. “It is his truck. He can do whatever he wants with it.”
Truer words never spoken. When it comes to major issues, change can be hard, but surely we can survive a restorer’s decision to color outside the lines every now and then. Was it heresy to remake True Grit, or just a new interpretation? When “right on red” turns were legalized, was it the end of Life As We Know It, or just a way to improve traffic flow? Did the three-point shot ruin basketball, or inject new life into the game?
In the end, even old Henry Ford saw the merit of a new idea. And thank goodness for that. If nothing ever changed, as the old saying goes, there’d be no butterflies.
