Last weekend I had a brief road trip from my SoCal home to my brother's
home in Fresno, CA, a distance of some 250 miles. I have been storing his 35'
5th wheel house trailer in my yard and jumped at the chance to get rid of
this rather large obstruction. I have another pickup, a Ford F-250 with 1 ton
springs and a 460/auto/gearvenders over/underdrive setup that provided the
tractive effort for our journey.
Fresno is a farming town, smack in the middle of the great Central
Valley. It is basically a desert, made wildly productive by the miracle of
modern irrigation. The valley has been farmed for a lot of years, and has
lots of old farming equipment sitting around. I had been after my poor
brother for some time to find me an old AD to drive as when I was last in the
area twenty-five years ago, it was full of them. Well, I don't need a truck
now as I found one just around the corner last year, but I did look forward
to having a look to see what was available after so many years.
The routing for the trip was pretty simple, I-5 north to Bakersfield,
then split off on old Rt. 99, the trip home being just the reverse. The
oletrucks started in Bakersfield. I didn't see a heck of a lot of them, but
they are still out there. Every so often, one would appear, parked next to
the other pieces of old farm equipment, awaiting it's fate sometime in the
future. The area gets just 9 or so inches of rain a year, so a lot of
basically sound projects await out there guys.
In Fresno at the trailer park where I spotted the 5th wheel, a '52
Suburban in almost completely original shape still labored on. It had
recently been painted and somebody had removed the rear seats years ago. It
was hauling trash when I saw it, and the owner set and yarned with me for 45
minutes or so. He had the truck for twenty some years and done nothing but
grind the valves and change the oil up until he splurged and had it painted.
It's hard to kill these old Chevys.
On the way home we ran into one last oletruck. At the very top of the
Grapevine a '54 AD howled along in the slow lane, driven by an elderly man
with a Frank Sinatra style hat. Yup, the're still out there folks!
Paul O'Neil, Hudson29@aol.com
1951 Chevrolet 3600 Pickup Project, See it at:
The Poor Man's Advanced Design Tech Tips Page
http://home.earthlink.net/~conntest47/
Fullerton, California USA
AEROMARK - Need Rubber Stamps or Signs? See:
http://hometown.aol.com/hudson29/myhomepage/index.html
oletrucks is devoted to Chevy and GM trucks built between 1941 and 1959
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