[tubman]

My old '36 3-window that I bought out of Longville, Texas in the early nineties had no serial number on the frame in that location. I had purchased the car with an "appropriate" number on the title, and everything went through the Minnesota DMV fine. A few weeks after purchasing the car, I was going over it in detail, checking everything out, and I could not find a stamped serial number. I talked to a guy I knew back then named Bruce Johnson from the western suburbs of Minneapolis, who had quite a collection of pre-war Fords and was constantly buying and selling them, mainly through the V8 Times. He was the de facto expert on these cars back then, and told me to bring the car over, and he was sure he could find it. After a couple of hours of scraping, sanding, cleaning, and even an inspection with a high power glass, he had to admit that he could not find it. If you would have seen my front frame rail after he was done, you would have to agree that he did a thorough job.

So it seems that there were some cars that got out of the factory without that stamped number, or (more likely) some folks went to great lengths to remove them. After owning the car for about 10 years and getting familiar with it (and old Fords in general) it was apparent to me that it was what we called a "put-together" car. The car looked good and ran good, but that (and a number of other factors) is why I sold it when I got the proverbial "offer I couldn't refuse".

To this day, it is one of a few cars that I had that I don't regret selling.