Tim MacManus was master of ceremonies at the LCOC National 2016 Western Meet in Westminster, Colorado and an important member of the Rocky Mountain Region Committee that organized the meet. He was born in New York City in Forest Hills, just beside Brooklyn.
The family then moved up to Old Greenwich, then down to Montgomery, Alabama where his father had a truck refrigeration company. When his father saw the original story on the Edsel he went to the Detroit Auto Show and saw the car for the first time and fell in love with it because the tail lights went all the way across the back when most of the others just had round tail lights in the fender and the front had a most unusual look and the instruments had a speedometer that rotated. It also had a button that when you pushed it it would lubricate your front end.
So he became an Edsel dealer in Burlington, North Carolina. But right away came the recession of 1958. The Edsel fit into a slot to better compete with General Motors. The Pacer and Ranger were on the Ford frame and the Corsair and Citation were on the Mercury frame. Then in December 1957 an article came out in Time magazine that put the car in ill repute and it never recovered from that. Women stopped coming into the showrooms. This was also the first year that over a million imports were sold in the U.S. The Edsel the wrong car at the wrong time with the wrong design. For 1960 it was given a Ford design but it was too late. While the car lasted, Tim worked in his father’s dealership detailing Edsels and that’s where he learned to love cars.
After college, he went to work for Procter and Gamble. He started out with product goods, Head and Shoulders, Crest, Gleem, Scope, Prell, Secret, and he was so successful in three territories that he was selected to head the introduction of Pampers. It was so successful they couldn’t keep them on the shelves. From that success, he took a course in industrial real estate. He has sold industrial real estate ever since, for forty-six years.
When he was young he had five hearses. He has always had two or three cars, even when things weren’t going so well. He now has a 1957 Cadillac Brougham, two 1958 Edsel Citation convertibles, a1964 Cadillac convertible, a 1979 Continental Mark V, a 1957 Continental Mark II, and a 1957 Thunderbird which is an Amos Minter ground up restoration. All of these cars are kept in a climate controlled facility near downtown Denver.
The 1979 Continental Mark V is a Collector’s Series that is black on black with a leather interior and a moonroof. It has the 400 cubic inch engine. He bought this car in the summer of 2015 from a dealer who had bought it out of a family estate with only 16,000 miles. The car had 22,000 miles at the time Tim bought it in the summer of 2015. At the time of the 2016 Westminster LCOC meet it had 23,000 miles. Only the 400 CID engine was offered for 1979. Most Collector’s Series were either white or midnight blue.
We have never seen a black one before and we do not know how many of this color were built. Four Designer Series were built. There was also a Luxury Group Series. Total 1979 Mark V pro¬duction was 75,939. The Mark V was an enormously successful car. Downsized 1980 Mark VI production was only about half that amount.