1951 1-Ton"Earning its keep" from the get-go
In the fall of 1971, I was recently out of the Army and broke. I got $135 a month on the GI Bill and was cutting firewood for extra money -- $35/cord delivered, split and stacked. Delivering 2-3 trips with my 1948 1/2-ton Chev. This was not a get rich quick scheme.
I found a 1951 1-ton in the want ads for $175 and drove a 100 miles to look at it. I was going in that direction anyway so it's not as bad as it sounds.
The dark green, 1-ton pickup ran, had assorted dents and a sound bed and slightly better-than-fair tires. What clinched the deal was the push-button turn-signal switch and the yellow wheels -- just like Grandpa Burke's truck I'd last seen 6 or 7 years before and about 20 miles away. Grandpa was my friend Steve Burke's Grandpa.
I drove the truck the 90 miles home in about two hours. I didn't stop.
With this old beast I could haul a cord+ each trip with no sweat. It wasn't fast but it got the job done. It's first paying job was to haul a load of used fire brick from Seattle to Bellingham for a local artist to line his kiln. He wanted to make the trip worthwhile and insisted we load it to the top of the box. I have no idea how much that weighed but we took some hills on I-5 at 35 MPH, right foot beat clear to the floor. As the say: that's all there is; there ain't no more.
I remembered that Grandpa Burke, who was a machinist at the Kenworth factory, had built up 235 to replace the anemic factory 216. When I pulled the head to do a valve job, I discovered my truck had a Babbit beater 235. Maybe it really was Grandpa Burke's old pickup but he was now dead so I couldn't ask him. Steve had disappeared into a drug haze somewhere after the Viet Nam war.
Anyhow, the old truck hauled cord wood, gravel, rockery rocks, hay and eventually a camper.
Along the way, one of the backwoods hippies had scrapped out an old GMC log truck and saved the brownie, drive shafts, linkage and shift tower. He sold me the package for $100. I thought that was pretty steep at the time but I was tired of sitting in third gear waiting for the top of the hill to come so I bought it.
What a difference! It took a while to get the angles right and the vibration damped out but it would get down the road a 60 mph not 48 and I could pull the same hills at 40 instead of 30.
The truck mostly just hauls the camper now and goes to ATHS shows.
Thanks for the story and the pics.
