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 was 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.)
Cool. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks!
Work trucks can leave an impression, I still remember the fleet from the rental yard 30 plus years ago. I also still have an obscure desire to own a small medium duty truck with a two speed axle, just because.
They are useful! And sometimes fun. And if it’s not yours, well… I’ll have to see if we’re past the statute of limitations for some of the dumb things we did with airport trucks.
Drove a Ford manual trans 20′ box truck in the summer of ’71 for Nationwide Papers distribution div of International Paper that serviced DC (mostly gov’t printing services) and inner Balto City. Delivering to the old McCormick plant in the Inner Harbor on Light St downtown was a real bear, with very narrow alleys leading to their loading docks out back. All the spices in the air there sure smelled good though the deliveries were a challenge.
That summer was quite an eye opener for me, coming from Towson and being around a lot of real downtown blue-collar workin’ guys for the first time was a real hoot, some were quite wild n’ crazy.
Cool! Sounds like a fun experience.
Though I was never a “truck driver” I too have driven a pile of trucks over the years. Trucks are a passion for me, the fire lit by my Grandfather who supplied me with Structo Toy trucks. Unfortunately he passed away when I was 6 and never got to see the big horse W900 KWs I worked on in the late ’70s. I grew up in a crossroad town with lots of truck traffic, tankers to haul milk from a dozen 60 cow dairys, old tater haulers coming out of the fields no hoods or mufflers, tandem axle dumps building the interstates, flatbeds hauling boulders for jettes. The first truck I rode in was a ’34 Ford, Tom’s old farm truck. His sister gave my sister piano lessons and while waiting I followed him around like a puppy. Years later, after he died, I bought that truck from his sister.
At 13 I started hauling hay and straw with a guy, 55 squares on a 68 F100. He moved up to a B series GMC 400 bales in a closed trailer. He eventually bought a new L model Ford.
In high school I drove a wrecker for the local body shop, our fleet consisted of a ’49 Chevy 4100, a ’58 Chevy and a new ’73 Ford F350. Too many stories to tell here.
Spring of ’76, a month before my 19th birthday I took a job at a newly opened KW dealer, I went to trade school in the day and worked there at night. Because I had wrecker experience I shuffled dead horses in and out of the shop with an IH R190. After a year I became their gear man, clutches, transmissions, rear ends. “If you’re gonna fix ’em, ya gotta be able ta drive ‘um”. And so I did, 5sp x 2sp Chevy, Ford, IH straight trucks, 9, 10 and 13 sp KW, Pete, GMC, White and Frieghtliner tractors, 2 stick 4×4 and 5x4s in tri-axle trucks, 2 stick quadbox B model Macks, the list goes on.
In ’80 I bought a farm and moved south, 2 trailer loads of machinery pulled by a barrowed IH 4070.Took a job at a trash co. We ran Cat powered Fords and Macks. When I wasn’t turning wrenches I picked up the slack running a rolloff. We had an L8000 with an 1160 Cat and a 5×4, fast truck and would pass fleet trucks fenders flapping, black smoke rolling! When it blewup it got replaced with a DM600 Mack. The other L8000 had a 3208 Cat w/ 613 roadranger, crossed the scale at the dump one day with a gross weight 73300, not bad for a ten wheeler and 210 horses. After I left there I moved around some settling in at an Ag dealer. We had a regular truck driver but the days he didn’t show I would end up delivering, first with a Cat powered C Ford and later with a DT466 powered S model IH.
My own list is pretty extensive, when I started farming I needed a pickup and bought a 49 Chevy 3100, after an overhaul it became my daily driver through the late ’70s early ’80s. When I needed a bigger truck I traded an engine rebuild on a JD loader for a 1600 IH Loadstar, it went down the river in the ’85 flood. That same year I pulled the 49 off the road and bought a 68C10 Chevy, moved up 20 years but still 20 years behind the times. It was replaced a few years later by a ’79 F150 4×4. When we started at the farmers market I bought my Dad’s 84 F150 and built a tall topper on it to haul flowers and produce. Not big enough so we picked up an 85 P30 Chevy with a 16’ load area. Some where in the mix was an 88Ranger and a ’79 Chevy K10 that we pulled a trailer with for 30 years till it got tired and we replaced it with an ’18 RAM 2500. We sold the ’68 C10, the Ranger and the ’79 K10. Kept or wished I’d kept every truck I ever had except the RAM, Wish I’d never bought it.
Amazing! And big trucks were an influence on me, too, as a kid, though I never drove them. I was a kid during the CB craze, and still notice how much freight trucks move.
Glad you enjoyed, there’s way much more to a more than 35 year odyssey, but I’m not the best of writers.
Trucks. Hmmm, trucks I’ve driven, real trucks, not just pickup trucks, which I can rant about too.
’74, must have been around 20, working at a huge chemical plant, briefly, long story. We had to acidize a reactor, with inhibited hydrochloric acid IIRC. 500 gallons? Truck was I think a 2 ton, dualies, two speed axle it said. I got elected, volunteered, whatever, I knew how to drive, I’ll drive it. Basic 4 speed, ran it thru the gears in low, then tried to shift the rear axle into high, dropped back down to first and wow, almost locked up the rear wheels. Although it said it was, I don’t think it either was or the 2 speed axle didn’t work. This was all in the plant and probably on dirt so NBD. I just drive in 4 low for the rest.
A 14,000 pound forklift. IIRC the engine was rebuild in ’52, WWII surplus in the late 80s. No power steering. I never got lock to lock, but I did go most of the way and counted 14 complete turns of the steering wheel. Talk about slow steering…
Scariest one was a Budget rental truck. 24 foot box, GMC truck, diesel. Not a heavy load, but some. Slow, very slow, which I was ok with as driving it was scary. Braking even worse, slower to brake than accelerate and that was only in the technical sense of the word. The first 200 miles were in the dark and it was raining, terrible visibility, though not the fault of the truck except for the crappy headlights. I didn’t want to back that thing a foot, as I couldn’t see in the dark, raining. Clear and sunny the next day was only frightening instead of terrifying, but still no fun. If that thing had been fully loaded, let along overloaded, no, that never happens, you would need weightlifter legs to stop that thing, which i do not have.
Broke down in Colorado a couple of years ago, had to tow my Nissan Xterra home. With much ado I got a U haul van based box truck, 14′ box? With a car trailer. That thing I could back like a pro, no problems. Problem was driving on I80 with an empty billboard, er, box van/truck, with an 7,000 pound anchor behind it, with 80MPH speed limits, wind and semis blowing past me at 85 almost pushing me off the road with the wind wash. A 660 mile day in it and I felt like I’d just done 10 rounds with a heavyweight contender. To say I was beat was an understatement.
Worked on semis a bit at one job in the 80’s. Maintenance mechanic in a factory, but it included working on their trucks. Didn’t like it, seemed like nothing weighed less than a hundred pounds, and lots of stuff more. Oil change was 14 gallons, fill up a 5 gallon bucket, almost full, 3 times, then check it. Yes, that was gallons, not quarts.
Sounds like a radial engine plane’s oil capacity!
I drove forklifts at work for years. I think a bit smaller, 10,000 pounds maybe.
I’ve driven enough rentals to have sympathy for people driving them, probably untrained, lost, doing their best.
I drove quite a few trucks in my younger days. Lots of medium duty Chevrolets and Fords, and some Super Duty Fords and a few others. I still like getting into one occasionally if I need to rent a dump truck. Truckin’ gets under your skin.
I love trucks as much now as I did when I was 5 or so .
Like many here I drove more than a few I wasn’t licensed for and many poorly maintained or simply improperly spec’d out rigs that didn’t stop well those were scary .
I’m enjoying the stories, I was once driving a pavement slurry rig with 10,000 + pounds in the tank, missed a shift and suddenly was looking at the under side of a freeway overpass as the rig did a wheelie at 35 MPH or so, I wasn’t worried about getting hurt when it crashed, I was sad I’d be fired from the good paying job with benefits .
Luckily when I released the foot feed the front end crashed to the ground and all was well .
The comments about farm rigs and elderly forklifts, whew ~ some were death traps when new and didn’t get any better over the decades .
-Nate
I drove forklifts for work for a while, and a friend asked me to help him move stuff at his dad’s shop with their old forklift. I don’t remember what it was, but it was small and old and… loose. Try to move and there was a 1-2 second delay. I passed. Maybe if you were used to it you could use it safely, but I didn’t want to destroy something of his dad’s trying to guess if the thing would do what I wanted.
I love trucks. Before I became a pilot I was a trucker. To scratch the itch today, I have a fleet of trucks Everything from a few pickups to a Freightliner cabover, with a 5 ton M923 military truck, dump truck, and a few others in the middle.
Cool!