Alan Ralston started collecting De Sotos in the mid-80s, including the white wagon with a 361 parked in the front of his shop, one of two street-worthy sleds he has so far restored from his fleet of nine or ten. In back, one of the Fireflites holds an intact Torsion-Aire suspension.
“I would have been eight years old in 1959, and when you’re a boy you’re always dreaming about driving a car. One of the most appealing things about a De Soto is that it has a push-button transmission. An eight-year-old doesn’t know how to shift gears, so we dreamed about driving cars like this and shifting the gears by pushing the push-buttons.”
Ralston’s collection is stored in a downtown Mendota building that once held a U.S. post office, Ernie’s Liquors, and finally a thriving indoor marijuana farm. After the farm was shut down, Ralston bought it from the feds in 1992. “I’ve put a home in the upstairs for my wife and me. I live here,” he said, when I found him at work in the shop the other day. The south end of the building is in various stages of restoration as the energetic man gradually builds a garage for his push-button 59s. He plans to restore all those cars after he retires from his job as a flight operations programmer at Northwest Airlines.
About a year and a half ago, someone started pushing Ralston’s buttons. It started on September 11, 2001. “I was so upset that I came home. What I was doing is, I had my American flag out and I was waving it on the sidewalk and saluting people and just trying to get support for the United States ’cause I was very saddened by what happened to us. And then I made a little poster that said ‘revenge,’ and I taped that up to the side of the wall in the front.”
The next day, a passerby was upset by this message. A woman driving a maroon Buick stopped her car. “She actually came in, and I was up on the scaffolding, and she said, ‘Did you put that sign up on the side of the building?’ and I said, ‘Yes, I did,’ and she said, ‘You really shouldn’t feel that way. You shouldn’t think that way.’ And I said, ‘The last time I checked, it’s a free country and we can think and we can say what we want, including you.’
“I got up the next morning, and my flag had been stolen off the side of the building, along with my poster.” Admitting he has “nothing to prove it,” he nonetheless feels certain that the woman in the maroon Buick was behind this and other acts of vandalism that followed.
When the first flag was stolen, he put a reinforced flagpole bracket higher up on the building. A motivated vandal threw a rope over it to pull it down. Ralston responded with guy wires anchored into the masonry to support the pole. And, of course, he has famously exercised his First Amendment rights in paint on the front of the building:
To those who stole my flag and poster: You cannot silence my speech or diminish my love for the United States. With resolve and might we will defeat our enemies. Alan L. Ralston, citizen soldier 9/17/2001.
GOD BLESS AMERICA
This bracket was not bent by the wind! Those who continue to be intolerant of my First Amendment rights, please be advised that I exercise my Second Amendment rights with equal fervor. Alan L. Ralston 9/9/2002.
Since adding that second warning, the vandalism has stopped. But he thinks he knows why his messages disturb some people.
“I think there’s a lot of people who don’t support the United States. They feel America is always wrong no matter what we do. And they can’t stand anyone who loves the country and supports the country and demonstrates patriotism.
“I find it interesting that even a year and a half later, people drive by and they stop across the street and they read it. And you see people come out and take pictures of it. I think that’s nice.” Eventually, the messages will be painted over as Ralston restores the rest of the building. He thinks he might have a public ceremony when the time comes.—Joe Pastoor
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