When Parkwood Chevrolet closed in late 1966 it set up something that would appear in 2008 as the bankruptcy of Harlem Chevrolet Saturn. The picture is from a house built in my new neighborhood in 2007 that was torn down a couple of years ago. But how did I get from 1966 to 2017? The story continues with: My Truck (Commercial Cargo or Vocational Vehicle) There are at least three immediate sources of interest that structured the network of interests I explored and exploited. The first was my grandfather’s stake truck and panel. The second was neighbors who drove vendor and over-the-road trucks. The third was my uncle Jerry Farnsworth who drove a steel hauling flat-bed tractor with double trailers for Hess Cartage. Improvised solutions using cars with trailers for farm to market and vacation provisioning that led to a truck chassis recreational vehicle are included where appropriate. My earliest memories of my grandfather’s big truck are from the shed behind his general store in East Williamson, New York. He always bought Ford that I guessed as 1-1/2-ton dual wheel chassis when I eventually saw some literature at the local dealer. My uncle assured me it was a 7-ton gross weight vehicle with helper springs and a hydraulic ability to dump the flat bed. That was later many years after he had sold his interest in the store and it was being torn down. I would now estimate from the look of the truck it was a pre-1948, probably a 1946. It was green and had a flatbed with stakes that was mounted on what I saw as 16-1/2-inch wheels, dual at the rear and single at the front. The stakes were very tall and tapered by location toward the back to give a tarpaulin when it rained a way to shed water. It usually had no rear stakes across the back. Gravity was the primary means to keep things on the truck. This meant that heavy items like rolls of linoleum or carpet were on the sides and longitudinal. Tiles in boxes were toward the front. Light items like underwear or paper towels or cereal in large consolidated boxes went under the tarpaulin which was secured at the sides to steel square loops. The earliest panel van I remember was a 1949 or 1950 by the look of the grille which was the well-known square bars in a stack with headlights beside that on the fender faces. Both trucks had marker and turn indicator lamps on the fenders at the front but only the big truck had clearance lights on the front top of the cab. There was only a driver’s seat in the panel and the big truck had a full width dark brown bench. The big truck had a floor shift to a wide ratio four-speed with a snap button switch on the shaft below the main knob to engage or disengage the two-speed electric-shifted rear axle. Climbing the Dugway near Lake Irondequoit often required driving up in creeper gear. The biggest truck I knew closely did not appear until around 1955 or 1956. My uncle Jerry came to visit us and drove his rig right up on the grass of South street. The tractor was a gas-engine V-8 GMC that had dual exhausts and was very loud. I remember it as sort of orange in color. The trailers were very short. Now I would say less than 25 feet as the overall rig had to be under 50 feet including the tractor. As such, tandem axles were out. The wagon type tow bar for the second trailer was very short. The first trailer used a fifth-wheel hitch. Lettering on the doors of the tractor proclaimed the name of the business owner. Across the street from our house in the early fifties Bob Rowe occasionally drove home a tractor from Weiderhold Freight Lines but I only remember the rear view of a single occasion. He eventually got a slipped disk and had to give up driving a tractor moving to route sales and a much lighter truck. Several years later in 1959 he got a brand-new design GMC V-6 with torsion bar front suspension Frito-Lay aluminum Grumman body potato chip truck. Earlier he had had a New Era potato chip driver vendor truck. The merger of the two companies was the change. I drove that truck in and out of the Krohn’s Standard Service where it parked at night and was garaged after I began work there until I left for college in September of 1961. The other neighbor across Gratton street was Cliff Golding who drove for either Wonder or Rainbow bread for several years. These were Chevrolet six-cylinder medium sized van trucks with 20-inch wheels, dual in the rear. Each morning he would go out on a regular route through the small gas station groceries and the larger ones in the cities and towns and cross roads of Huron county. At night, every night he would return home and break down the large boxes. He had to pick-up his own merchandise from the bakery in? Bay City about 50 miles away or Saginaw about 60 miles distant and return. I had taken refuge while I was in early grade school from bullies from the collocated high school in the Huron County Garage. There I would watch the mechanics work on Walter dump trucks with under frame angle blades and large Austin-Western four-wheel-drive road graders. These had large rough tread tires not quite as large as on motor scrapers or quarry trucks. The mechanics gave me a roller bearing race removed from an unserviceable wheel of one of the graders. They also gave me large ball bearings from another area of the machine. I used them to play marbles with kids at school. If I lost I would trade it out with two purees. The city road grader that ran into my father’s Plymouth one Winter also was lodged and maintained there. When a vehicle came back a beeping would come from the door which was automatic and it would raise and the grader or truck would drive in. You had to be careful! Not in what is reported so far is farm machinery at Greene’s farm that only went on a road to go to a field like the McCormick-Deering Farmall for plowing or tilling or harvesting and the Ford “cow chaser” that opened the gates and herded the cattle to and from the pastures for milking. There was also an Allis-Chalmers Jr. rear engine small tractor for tilling the large garden by the house and shed. I could look at them in the shed when I went out with the Greene boys to visit their grandmother and the hired man. Later my father bought a Roto-hoe gasoline powered tiller to supplement the hand pushed cultivator and rakes and hoes and shovels we used when my father rented a field near a farm taken over in the depression. This machine used the clawing of hooks to dig up hard clay and drag itself along. The operator held onto handles like for the cultivator while steering it and clearing clods by shaking it. It had a two horsepower Lauson engine. I rebuilt it in the late fifties along with the engine in the Lawn Boy 1-1/2 horsepower, 18 inch cut rotary mower. Each year my father had removed the tines and had the tips rewelded with carbide hard metal to sharpen them. Baling and harvesting crews came at harvest time with their towed balers and combines and different tractors. I worked for a very short time on a wagon being loaded with loose hay windrowed earlier and lifted by an elevator attached to the back where the loose hay was forked onto the elevator as the wagon and elevator was pulled along by the Farmall. I found I had hay fever from the dust and dropped out. Every fall the Huron County Fair brought trucks loaded with Carnival rides including the stationary McCormick-Deering and Allis-Chalmers stationary power on each ride. At some point, self-propelled combines were added to the sales displays. This added Gleaner and John Deere as well as Minneapolis Moline to the brands. These were huge machines with tractor tires wider than for plowing tractors and small pivot wheels on the back similar in size to the row crop front wheels of the ordinary tractors. New Holland showed balers and other implements both towed and tractor mounted. After I was 16 and it was time to get a driver’s license, I choose to take the more thorough test for a chauffeur’s license to assist my friend Duane McKichan on his father’s farm. He needed a second driver in the fall to transport sugar beets to the refinery plant in Sebewaing over back roads. Before that happened, he found a chassis with tandem axles for a larger body. It consisted of a 1950 Ford front cab and front axle and the rear axles from a wrecked fire truck. With the new grain type body with added high side boards, he could haul all the product with no need for help. So much for my adventure as a trucker. What did happen was Duane drove in a John-Deere 580 two-cylinder diesel tractor fitted with a Ford blade on the rear 3-point hitch to plow snow off the gas station driveway. I was taught how to use the controls which were all hand, throttle, gear shift, steering wheel, and brakes as well as the control to raise and lower the three-point hitch. By backing carefully, the whole driveway could be quickly clear. I had to be ginger and not over power any rocks I got caught on as that might have broken the somewhat small plow from a smaller tractor when I got off the paved area of the driveway. Once the Joh-Deere was left outside to make room for the Frito-Lay truck and could not be started in the cold. Mikey Cottick brought his dodge Power Wagon wrecker and towed the tractor on the main paved road as the rear wheels skidded in opposite directions of rotation due to the differential until the engine turned over and started. Sometime before 1960 three dump trucks came to use our pumps as a fleet filling point and I got to check oil and look over a GMC with a Pontiac V-8 engine, a GMC with an Oldsmobile V-8 engine and air compressor and brakes, and a Chevrolet that in 1956 came with an adapted Buick 322 V-8 that was marketed as the “Loadmaster.” This was one element in a later swap I made into a Chevrolet V-8 long after Otie Robinson brought his International pickup he had made an adapter for and put a Buick V-8 engine in his TV repair and antenna installation truck. The second element came in the form of a 1947 one-ton Ford pickup Bill Zulauf brought to show off. It had a stock wide ratio 4-speed transmission with the “creeper” or “granny” low gear of a bigger truck, including my grandfather’s. With a dialog about Jeeps and ¾ ton Dodge weapon carriers during WW-II with my uncle Evan I didn’t want a heavy vehicle. Even with a winch on the front to tie into trees or Deadman buried timbers it was best to have a vehicle the crew could push or lift out of mud. Later Duane bought a used Jeepster pickup with the flathead four of that type. It froze after being rebuilt by the man I got assistance from on my own V-8 build. I was blamed! Hey!? I was a beginner! The Pohle Exploration brought a group of jeeps to park and be serviced at the gas station. Along with them was the foreman’s Chevrolet Cameo carrier that had a fiberglass bed that predicted the later Styleside of the 1960’s. I looked long and hard at the brochures from George Chevrolet and decided against the new for 1967 low profile transfer case of the 4 x 4. I perused the stock of new vehicles that included a Custom Cab yellow and white 6-foot Styleside with a 396 cubic inch engine like in my 1966 car and an automatic transmission, an 8 foot Flareside with a 292 six and a 3 speed heavy duty transmission, and a six foot Styleside with a 327 cubic inch V-8 and a 4 speed close ratio four speed transmission. These were C-10, ½ ton rating. The one I chose had heavy duty rear suspension, a wooden bed floor, foam seat but no arm rests or second sun visor and a 283-cubic-inch V-8 with a wide ratio 4-speed transmission. The emission controls on the engine were PCV valve, EGR valve, and the A.I.R. reactor with pump that squirted pressurized air into the exhaust ports whenever the engine overran on deceleration. A clownish large pipe ran up from the carburetor to the air cleaner with little necks to attach the various rubber hoses. Hey! I had radio and heater and the foam seat. I was ready for the unimproved roads of the Mojave Desert hauling my motorcycles to the AMA Enduros and Hare and Hounds, even in Winter. No more bumping my head on the roof on deep washboards. No more bottoming of the suspension on the frame yet on the highway the lack of heavy suspension up front gave a comfortable ride. The heavier frame of the 4 x 4 I also decided not to include. My gross weight fully loaded would be only 3900 pounds. The price was only $2900.00, 900.00 less than the 1966 SS had been. That included taking off the 2 ply tires and substituting hard Cooper 6 ply truck tires that took 50 psi of air. I was austere and rugged. The first trip I took was back to Michigan along US route 66 reverse of my trip to California. This included thunder storms and heavy rain at Flagstaff, Arizona. My wife had just had a miscarriage and we stopped in Amarillo to stay one night with the parents of one of her high school friends in Amarillo, Texas. There was no room at the Inn that night. Then off to the cafes and truck stops of the open road. Going through Oklahoma we passed a Suzuki 600-6 that was obviously in distress and running at overspeed in a lower gear. It was May and very cold. We found at a rest stop the rider was from University of Nevada and had maps as insulation in his shirt. He had broken a gear for 6th and was trying to get home. We put him in the back with my two motorcycles until he began to wave a big sheath knife in the back of the rear window. Then off on our own. Ooops, I knocked his bike over as he had positioned it right behind my tail gate so I was boxed in.