When F-150 Lightning Chief Engineer Linda Zhang recently graced the cover of Time magazine, she became the latest in a long line of Ford executives and team members to be featured on the face of a national publication.

Henry Ford was featured on the cover of Time and other publications on multiple occasions, as was his grandson and successor, Henry Ford II. Other Ford execs have also been featured on magazine covers through the decades, but in the days following introduction of the iconic Mustang in 1964, Ford division vice president Lee Iacocca appeared concurrently on two of the most prominent national publications, Newsweek and Time. Reportedly, it was the first time a retail product appeared on either magazine’s cover. Iacocca credited the exposure with the sale of an additional 100,000 Mustangs.

Codenamed T-5 and Turino, the Newsweek article notes Mustang was chosen from a lengthy list of horse names that also included Colt and Bronco, though both Time and Newsweek note Henry Ford II was fond of the name Thunderbird II. Other details on the pony car’s origin story include Iacocca’s insistence the car feature a “mouthy appearance” for the front, and how expected production volume increased drastically in the leadup to the car’s April 17 introduction at the 1964 World’s Fair.

The specter of the ill-fated Edsel of the late 1950s is noted in both articles, though Iacocca, then 39, says in the Newsweek piece the vehicle would have been a hit had it been introduced in a favorable market as Mustang was. Time compared Mustang to European race cars, saying it had a “Ferrari flare.”

“Yet Iacocca has made the Mustang’s design so flexible, its price so reasonable and its options so numerous that its potential appeal reaches toward two-thirds of all U.S. car buyers,” the article reads. “Priced as low as $2,368 and able to accommodate a small family in its four seats, the Mustang seems destined to be a sort of Model A of sports cars – for the masses as well as for the buffs.”

Both magazines include phonetic descriptions of the young executive’s last name – “rhymes with try-a-coke-ah,” Time wrote – which had not yet become a household one. Mustang went on to sell a record 419,000 units in its first 12 months on the market, and millions more in the more than half-century since. 

Confident in Mustang’s revolutionary success, Iacocca told Time, “I see this as the start of a new golden age for Ford that will make the peaks of the past look like anthills.”