Mr. Curtiss has made one major upgrade, installing a Hudson Terraplane engine in 1940, because, he said, “I raced kids home from high school with it, but there were a couple of cars I couldn’t beat.” That allowed it to go more than 80 miles an hour, compared with 55 m.p.h for a standard Model A. “Then I could beat them all,” he said.

Part of the car’s allure is that it has never been restored. There is a hole in one of the floorboards, cotton is coming out of the seats and some of the paint is wearing off. Mr. Curtiss has kits to restore it, but he can’t bring himself to use them. “People just love seeing it the way it is,” he said.

Mr. Curtiss also has a strong emotional attachment to the car. He met his wife, Dorothy, shortly after he bought it, when he was 17 and she was 14; they had been married 56 years when she died in 1998. The initials they carved on the steering wheel as teenagers can still be seen. “She was the first and only girl I ever kissed in the car,” he said. “It’s priceless because of that, as far as I’m concerned.”

“People say, ‘You’re probably glad that car can’t talk,’ ” he added.

Mr. Curtiss and Dorothy drove to the New York World’s Fair in Queens in 1940, and he drove to six Army camps from Massachusetts to Georgia when he served during World War II.

The Ford Motor Company made slightly more than five million Model A’s from 1928 through 1931. Chuck E. Christensen, 68, technical director of the Model A Ford Club of America, a collectors’ club based in La Habra, Calif., said there were an estimated 50,000 to 100,000 of those cars left. He said longtime owners like Mr. Curtiss were rare. “In most cases, the cars have been passed around many times over the years,” he said.