Here it is, 9:52 PM on the Right Coast, and no diligent AutoFlicker has prompted me to update the chronology. Thanks a lot, dudes.

On July 5, 1968, Izzy and his mom track a 1959 Desoto Firedome with a Stassen bumper sticker. This is one of my favorite chapters. Can’t believe the Followers let me down.

I was riding home from work with my mother, and in front of us was a 1959 Firedome, nephew to my father’s car, another winged experiment from the Ike fantasy world. Viewed from the rear, it hefted a barrage of thick chrome fittings and a large insignia that included a keyhole for the trunk. On either side, three protruding circular taillights were stacked on top of one another with a chrome V jutting over the top. It had two radio antennas, one on each side of the trunk, and a low, wide wrestler’s stance.

This particular vessel had a bumper sticker that said: “Stassen ’68—Why Not?” The former governor of Minnesota was on his fourth campaign in pursuit of the Republican nomination for president. He had at that point in the summer of 1968 rounded up just one delegate, and there were only a few weeks until the party convention in Miami. After the RFK assassination, the Secret Service assigned an agent to guard him.

It was said this protection was the biggest crowd Stassen had attracted so far in the campaign.

A perpetual anachronism, Stassen would keep running, in 1980, 1984, 1988 and 1992, and you can judge for yourself whether his country would have been better off in any of those years with a liberal Republican president committed to peace.