Ted, I just spent half an hour going over old photographs from that time and can not find one of Vick or his car. Sad. I thought a lot of Vick and all that he endured. That car would have been bought on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, so I suspect a Detroit origin, which may have been a six lug wheel, but who knows. Old Mr. Vick grew up very poor, only child, whose parents died when he was young, before the war, had a hard life for the most part, married after the war and had no children and only ever bought that one car brand new he told me. Since he would have been over 40 by then, it must have been like making it big to him. He was very proud of that car and it truly could fly. Heck, the owner of the nursing home might have bought it for $500, it being "just" a old car.
He was the first man I every knew who had served in the Italian campaign with General Clark and then later in the Pacific. Both times stuck carrying that flame thrower. In July '44 he was wounded, bad burns wouldn't you know it and returned to the States. Just before Christmas he got loaded up on a train, then a boat and sent to the Pacific. He figured a week later and they would have sent him back to Europe and right into the Battle of the Bulge. Until the hit the Pacific war he though he had dodge a bullet. Flame throwers got a lot of use on the islands. I thought he was kidding me when he first told me he had been in both Europe and the Pacific wars but he was not. Sometimes bad luck is just being available, when needs drive the Devil. They were scraping up replacements and he was there for them to ship out, the next month they were scraping up bodies to plug into the cannon fodder of the Bulge. He still hated both the Germans and the Japaneses when I knew him.
