Trucks I Have Known

Almost as rough as the one from camp.  When I search online for old pickups, they all look so… clean.

Though I was never a “truck driver,” I’ve driven trucks. Work trucks, and other odds and ends. Of course there were firetrucks and delivery trucks and dump trucks around when I was a kid, and I liked them, but I don’t think I ever rode in any. (My cousin’s son is a firefighter and took my daughter around the parking lot in a pumper, sirens going. I was jealous…)

First one I remember riding in was a ‘60s Chevy pickup a lot like the one above, used at the camp I went to during elementary school. A family camp: a bunch of friends of my Granddad’s had bought 80 acres in southern Ohio, a former farm. I assume the truck belonged to one of them. The adults used it for various chores, of course, and to run us kids around in the area. This was back when you could ride in the open back of a pickup. Was it not against the law then? Or was it just that enforcement was lax? Anyway, we would stand or sit and go into town. Or up the hill at the farm. And down it, quickly, bouncing around in the back. My wife would have a fit if I let my daughter do anything like that nowadays. But in the ’70s a bunch of boys and teens and grown men, free from civilization for a week, could do pretty much whatever the heck we wanted. I don’t remember any injuries. Of course, we also used to get inside steel barrels and roll down hills, bouncing off rocks and trees, so maybe the memories are gone… I still remember that truck, though.

Same truck as at the EAA maintenance hangar, painted differently.

During high school I interned for a few weeks at the Experimental Aircraft Association in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Part of the time I helped/observed in their maintenance hangar. Got to scrape corrosion out of the B-17’s tail, and find mouse nests complete with skeletons in P-38 booms. But the truck… Ah, the truck. A ‘70s Ford pickup the mechanics used. First day there I brought no lunch, so they said, “Just take the truck to the place down the road.” It was January in Wisconsin, snowy and icy. It wasn’t my first time driving, but it definitely was my first time driving a stick. But I couldn’t lose face in front of the guys. I figured it out, slipping and sliding and grinding half a mile to the restaurant. Not much traffic or other obstacles, so I made it back in one piece. The pie was good.

Far nicer than the ones we had at the school.

During college I worked summers at my former high school, maintenance and grounds crew. They had a couple of ‘70s Chevy pickups. For some reason I was the designated driver among my young peers (only one with a license?) It was fun, and I was inexperienced. Gouged a hole in the turf on a wet day by giving it too much gas. And, while driving through a narrow suburban downtown, smacked a parked pickup’s mirror with the extended ones on the school truck. They still let me drive after that…

After college I worked for Airborne Express for a year or so. They’re gone now, absorbed by DHL I think. We had mostly standard Ford vans, but also a few assorted box trucks, some Aerostars, and a few Festivas for downtown. I mostly drove the standard vans, delivering all over the city and out into the countryside. They were rear wheel drive, of course, and unless heavily loaded they were a little tail-happy. Once, getting on the highway during a snowstorm at the end of a run, I slid down the entrance ramp and into the ditch alongside it. Thankfully it wasn’t deep or full of water, and I was able to straighten the van out along the length of the ditch and drive back up onto the road. Another time I hooked the bare steel bumper onto another van’s, bending it back. We performed a parking lot repair, pushing it back till it was more or less straight.

What else? Oh, I got a ticket of course- you were urged to deliver everything before 1030am, and with my route out in the burbs and countryside I almost never could. “Don’t speed, but get everything delivered in time.” Yeah. Got the ticket on a Tuesday. On Wednesday I parking in what I thought was a loading zone but came out to see a cop behind me. Turned out to be the same officer from the day before, and when he saw me he rolled his eyes and said “just move it.”  I did.  And got a radar detector.

I liked the box trucks, and occasionally drove the 14-footer. Once in awhile drove an Aerostar, and it wasn’t bad, but again, lightly loaded it was tail-happy. Out during an ice storm because deliveries never stop, I was going 35 on an icy stretch of the outerbelt and got it sideways. Luckily it was 8 lanes wide and there was no other traffic because no one else was stupid enough to be out. I glided along for a bit and got it straight before any obstacles appeared. That was fun, looking down the road out the side window.

Typical fuel truck for bizjets, 2500 gallons or so.

After Airborne I worked at the airport, unloading freighters at first and eventually fueling small planes and then airliners. We had a fleet of trucks, from an F250 with a 500 gallon avgas tank to 10,000 gallon behemoths full of Jet-A. The pickup was fun- lots of torque down low, though the top speed was limited. When it was full it drove fine, when it was empty it could leap, almost pop a wheelie. It had a stick, and you could drop the clutch and cause a scene.

Me in a 10, early ’90s.

The other trucks were more sedate. Bigger tanks, less relative power. They lumbered around, and though you had to plan stops in advance were not exciting. We had one old dual-tank truck with 80 octane on one side for a few older small planes, and 100LL (low lead) on the other for the majority of lightplanes. When using that you of course had to be careful to use the correct fuel (always an issue, whatever fuel used.) Occasionally pilots would freak out when we were fueling them from the 100LL side but they walked up from the other side and saw “80,” thinking we were giving them the wrong one. Sometimes the 100LL ended up in our cars, usually because we had to defuel (drain) a plane for maintenance work. For bizjets we had some Fords that were around 2500 gallons. The 8- and 10,000 gallon airline tankers took getting used to, both for the size and because you sat in front of the front wheels, causing an odd swinging sensation when turning. Jet fuel weighs 6.7 pounds per gallon (depending on the temperature,) and so clearly when you add the vehicle weight to 50 or 60,000 pounds of fuel they were super heavy and ponderous. There was a deadman switch you held while fueling, and emergency shutoff handles all around the thing. A fun prank was to pull one of the less-obvious shutoffs and watch your coworker try to figure out why his or her truck wouldn’t move.

I liked working there, being outside and around aviation. But the pay sucked, the benefits sucked, the chances for advancement sucked. So I moved on, building and painting cars at Honda and driving forklifts on their docks. More stories there, and hundreds of thousands of cars, but not ones I drove (mostly.)