Not only wasn’t the guy next to me really Elvis, his opinion wasn’t even original.

A number of other men had expressed the same thing earlier in the day. About what the Edsel grille looked like, I mean.

And that was about the only good feature on the whole car. The rest of it looked like something out of a cartoon. Piss elegant was the proper term.

It had gadgets previously unseen in automobiles; it had pastel colors heretofore unknown to automotive metal.

This wasn’t just my reaction.

You could see it on virtually every face. It was like opening a birthday box to find a rat crawling around inside.

Being small-town folk the way we are, we didn’t say any of this to Dick Keys, of course. The usually cool Dick Keys looked nervous. His story was that as the handsomest kid, not only in his class but in the entire valley, he would go on to marry his own kind: a beauty.

Instead, he married a plain stout girl who just happened to be the wealthiest girl in the valley.

There was no smoother salesman than Dick Keys, and he ran the Ford-Mercury dealership well day-to-day. But it was rumored, and I believe true, that his wife, who’d put up the money for the dealership, made most of the important decisions. Today, Dick wore a white button-down shirt, red-and-blue regimental-striped tie, and a pair of blue slacks. He was good-looking in the sort of way that the second lead in romantic comedies is good-looking. He never gets the girl. Dick’s graying hair lent him an air of earnestness, and his slightly loose midsection reminded the rest of us mortals that when we reached Dick’s age-he was in his early fifties-we too would be faded by time. If it could happen to Dick Keys, it could happen to any of us.

Dick was one of hundreds of Ford dealers who were just now realizing that Edsel Ford and Robert Mcationamara had stuck him with one hilariously ugly sonofabitch of a car.