Can you believe it’s been 19 months since Ford has turned a monthly profit?

Unlikely as it sounds, it’s true. The last time Ford was looking at sales charts with smiles on their faces was November of 2007. Since then, it’s been one bad news after another and it had seemed like it would take forever for the company to finally be on the right side of the charts.

A year and a half and a month later, Ford finally has reason to celebrate. The Detroit-based company reported that it’s car sales from June shot up a pedestrian 2% in July. Make no mistake, the number may be underwhelming, but for a company that has been on the wrong side of sales charts for so long, they’ll take any positive rise any way they can get it.

The unexpected boost could be partially attributed to the Cash for Clunkers program, which has become a far greater sales catalyst than anyone expected. While the CFC program may have pushed the company over the top, Ford has also said that its car sales have been going strong even before the program officially opened last July 24. Then again, the company admitted that the program also had a tremendous effect on their sales for the latter parts of the month.

Continued after the jump.

The figures are indeed out and we’ll excuse Ford for being all warm and giddy. For the month of July, the company sold 158,838 cars and light trucks, 2% higher than the previous month, which eventually broke a dry-spell of 19 months of sagging sales.

While it’s still too early to tell as far as how the company will fare in August, we’ll give the folks over at Detroit a pat on the back and a hearty ‘congratulations’. We don’t know how they survived 19 months of plummeting sales and still maintained their sanity.

That, in itself, is cause for celebration.