MY FIRST TRUCK DRIVING EXPERIENCE The first truck I ever drove was not a pick-up. It was a 1955 Ford F600 with a home-made 12 foot grain dump box. At the time, I thought it was a BIG truck, although one just like it was sitting on the farm the last time I visited, and it looked pretty small to my post- semi-driven eyes! In case you haven’t gathered it from my other articles, I was a kid who was wowed by almost any mechanical thing, and the bigger the better, or the more off beat the better. I also had trouble with allergies and asthma- not a good thing for a kid who would be on a farm all the time if he had his ‘drothers. I usually stayed in the truck during wheat or oat harvest, at least until it became apparent whether or not the dust would bother me that year. (The wetter the year, the more the dust would get to me, generally, but we didn’t yet know that at the time of this event.) Usually, Lynn Taber’s father Caleman would drive the truck and Lynn would run the combine, but for some reason, on this particular day, Caleman wasn’t with us. I had ridden over to the field with Lynn in the Ford Truck, which was how this truck was always referred to. Usually, Lynn would drive the combine over to the truck to unload, but for some reason this time he just stopped and stood up and waved for me to come over. (There were no cabs on combines or tractors in those days!) I started out on foot, thinking Lynn just needed something such as a tool, but he shook his head and made steering wheel motions with his hands. My heart leaped almost out of my chest and I ran back and climbed into the driver’s seat and stepped on the clutch and turned the key, hoping the truck would start. It was known to be hard to start when it was up to full operating temperature, but it had only been driven the two miles from the farm to the field where we were, so it obliged me by firing right up! It was parked in low gear, but I had seen Lynn start out in second many times, so I tried to do the same, and got the timing of the accelerator pedal and clutch release wrong and stalled it. My mind went AAAAAAAGH! And I hurriedly got it running again and then put it back into low and we moved slowly over the edge of the field to where Lynn was waiting with a grin on his face. I waited with the truck in neutral while he unloaded, and then he came around and said “I thought you might do that! Low gear is probably fast enough in this field anyway, especially when I get a couple more bins on you.” That made my heart race, because it meant that I had the job of moving the truck to wherever he needed it for the rest of the afternoon, or at least until the truck was full anyway. He also told me to leave the truck running because he couldn’t make a complete round of the field before his bin filled up, so it wouldn’t be long between dumps. Just before he went back to the combine, he told me to back up a little way so that the dust cloud wouldn’t get me when he started out again and made sure that I knew how to apply the parking brake, using the lever between the shifter and the dump hoist lever. Of course I knew how, since I had watched both Lynn and Caleman do it countless times! All too soon, the truck was full and Lynn came and told me to move over and he got behind the wheel. I didn’t mind though, because we went on past the farm and headed right up to Culver’s Mill, which meant we might get to do another load that day. It was also about 5 or 6 miles from the field to the mill, and took probably 10 or 15 minutes to get there. We pulled up onto the scale (another contraption that fascinated me) and then were sent to a spot to unload. When we got there, we had to back the truck’s rear wheels up on some blocks so that the bottom of the box wouldn’t hit the auger we were dumping into. Lynn explained that the truck’s frame was too short, so the hinge point made the back of the box almost hit the ground when it was raised completely. The trip back was much faster, except that we stopped at the farm to get a couple fresh jugs of iced tea to go back to the field with. Once we got back, I got to drive again in the field, and then a storm started to head our way, and Lynn wanted to take the combine back to the farm, so that left me to follow him in the truck! WOW!!! The combine wasn’t very fast, so I only got up to second gear (low range), but it was still COOL! Both the truck and combine lived in the building we called the shop, and they both got inside just as the first drops of rain started falling. That was a really neat day for me. I think I was about 11 or 12, and had just gotten tall enough for my feet to reach the pedals that previous winter. My last visit to the driver’s seat of the Ford Truck came many years later, after Lynn had sold it to a friend of his who had started farming a place a mile or so from the Taber’s farm. Lynn’s friend was known to have problems keeping brakes in any vehicle he owned, and we were using this friend’s combine one year during corn harvest (ours did not have a corn head) , and we were bringing the corn from the field to the dryer in the Ford Truck and using our truck to take the dried corn to town. The Ford didn’t have any brakes , and the owner asked Paul, Lynn’s youngest son, to take it to the field for him. Paul refused due to the lack of brakes, and the owner told him “Well, the pedal’s there. You can step on it if it makes you feel better! But Paul still refused, so I took my old friend the Ford Truck to the field-SLOWLY! By the time my last drive of the Ford Truck happened, it had been replaced not once, but twice. The first truck to replace it was an International CO1850 (I think) with a 16 foot grain box built on the farm and an AUTOMATIC TTRANSMISSION! (Ugh! It should be illegal to put automatics in any truck larger than a !/2 ton wannabe truck!). When the “gutless wonder” in this truck died violently, it was then replaced by another International CO 1850, which is still in use with the same grain box, but has a more respectable 5 and 2 transmission arrangement! But the largest truck on the farm nowadays is a Mack 10 wheeler with a 350 hp Cummins and a 9spd Road Ranger in it. This truck was parked next to the old Ford that was brought to the farm to move silage and matches our old Ford Truck, and that no doubt made the Ford look even smaller to me. I should also state that I don’t much care for Fords today, but I do miss the old Ford Truck!