Ford LTD

On tonight's episode of Confessions of a Retired Detective, I'd like to tell a story from my NYPD career inspired by the Fonz.

So in the early 90s, I was assigned to the Precinct's Anti-Crime Unit, and we drove around in an unmarked four-door Ford LTD.

And it was far from anything undercover, but we're in plainclothes, and it gave us that precious few seconds to sneak up on the bad guys.

And after a while, all the bad guys figured out what kind of car we drove around the neighborhood, so we had to do different things like tint the windows and make it look like a gypsy cab.

I found this list about birds and which cars they poop on.

To be funny, when we were growing up, my parents had a brown Ford LTD. Oh, my gosh, LTDs.

I've almost forgotten about those things.

I can't recall if it was covered in bird droppings any more than our rust and white colored Ford extended cab pickup.

And yet, as intriguing as that question is, it obscures others.

For starters, why did anyone support the SLA? How did Patty Hearst remain on the loose for so long? And how did someone like Jack Scott, a former college athletic director with a 1972 PhD in education from Berkeley, come to be sitting next to the most wanted fugitive in America as they rode across the country in the backseat of a Ford LTD? Was there some method to this madness, or had the radical left simply lost its mind?

But that aforementioned fugitive, was that Patty Hearst?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And he's throwing darts in here, watching them fall.

He threw one, it went completely up and it came and it hit right in the middle of the next door neighbor's brand new Ford LTD back window.

And it just stuck and it didn't go through, but you could hear the glass going.

And we both took off running opposite ways.

I was coming home from school, and I saw a car coming down the opposite side of the road.

He lives on a dead-end street, and he saw a green Ford LTD.

I see the car make the U-turn area, and this man gets out of the driver's side, opens the door behind him, reaches in.

Mr. McEvers kind of crouched down behind his car so that he wasn't seen.

Said he had a little pouch belly.

He also tells police about the unusual car he saw that day.

And I knew immediately it was a Ford LTD, hunter green with a lighter green on the top.

So he went with the sketch artist, and the police did a composite drawing based on what Mr. McEvers said he saw.

He also had pickup trucks.

So I learned how to drive on a Ford LTD.

I used to drive a big Ford pickup truck.

What was the other one? I think we had a GMC.