>Was that not an epic time for a truck? For me, it was the 1962 Dodge
>truck Pa bought when I was in junior high.
>
>

Oh yeah. That's a cool truck. We were always a GM family when I was growing up, but even back then, most of my forebears agreed that Dodge pickups were sort of a special class.

(Which makes it all the more headshake-worthy to me that FCA doesn't even call them Dodges any more. Ram? Really? That has heritage? I assume it's just a phase their marketing people are going through.)

>Bench seats long and wide enough for a 6' human to stretch out and
>sleep on. With Giant Steel Springs (tm) underneath.

Indeed, the Giant Steel Springs™ are the only surviving part of Angus's original seats.

>Seat belts? HA! Dodge says you don't deserve seat belts! Though,
>honestly, some would have been nice. Rural roads + Giant Springs + no
>restraints equals bouncing around the cab.

In fairness to Dodge, that's more a matter of timing than manufacturer preference. The '66 has them because they became mandatory in that year; I'm sure if Angus were a '62 Chevy, it wouldn't have them.

>Manual choke? Check.

Oh man, I forgot about the choke. What a procedure starting one of those old engines in the winter was.

I have to be honest about this: I grumbled about heritage a few lines ago, but man, I do not miss carburetion. Now that the technology is mature, fuel injection is superior in every practical way.

>Three-speed transmission, on the column?

Heh, we managed to avoid that with Angus (as previously noted, we put in a floor shifter when we took out the Powerglide), but when I was maybe 10 or 12, my dad bought a mid-'70s GMC flatbed conversion (translation: the bed rusted out and the owner just put some boards on there) that had either a three or four on the column. The linkage was worn out and would occasionally jam, usually when you were someplace where you really didn't want to be climbing out and monkeying around under the hood to be able to put the truck in gear. I remember my sainted mother, who is something like 4'11" tall, having to do that once in the drive-thru lane at McDonald's. She was not pleased.

>Check, but don't shift into first unless you're stopped dead
>still.

I was fortunate in that the four-speed we had in Angus for a while during the Unreliable Clutch era did have synchro on all four. The three-speed we replaced it with didn't, but was so worn that it didn't really matter. :)

>We were coming up on a stop sign to a US highway at about 30mph when
>the brake pedal when "THUNK." on the floor. Pa stood, started pumping
>the pedal, said "Hang on." in that oh-so-calm-voice

Ah, the "well, that happened" voice. My dad isn't very good at that—a bit too high-strung—but my grandfather was always a dab hand at it. I remember him once uttering something to that effect when we were about to get dumped out of a canoe in a section of river that proved to have a steeper drop than we were expecting. :)

>After we stopped, I went back and looked over the corner. On the
>gravel shoulder, our tracks were a half-inch from the 3'-4' ditch.
>Like I said, the old man can drive.

There's no substitute for experience. :)

>Sherman shared this. If the tank's only half-full and conditions are
>slidy, sloshing gasoline changed your handling.

I guess pickup designers of the time thought it was more secure to put the tank in there than underneath the bed? I know GM had some problems with the frame-mounted saddle tanks in the '73-'87 generation of pickups. Seems like a daft idea nowadays, though.

>Dad bought Sherman as a replacement for his last pickup, a Ford of
>some breed. What we *should* have done was taken this very good
>condition antique and restored it. But it was to be a working truck,
>and we used it hard.

On the one hand, you're probably right; on the other, you had certain needs, and that's what those vehicles were intended for. I think one of the least attractive features of the classic car scene is that particular strain of holier-than-thou snobbery where people get prissily prescriptive about what other people should do with their old cars. I'm with Jay on this one—if I had a 1928 Bugatti and the wherewithal to operate it, I'd be out there roaring around in it whenever the weather was good enough. :)

>I joke that this truck made a man outta me, but truthfully it was a
>good vehicle to learn driving. Quirks and all, you learned why things
>worked and how to drive without any filters.

If nothing else, you learn how to manage contingencies like, well, like the clutch linkage failing. Or the electrical system excusing itself and leaving the room for a while, which was one of Hagbard the Beetle's party tricks.

Still, I have to acknowledge that there are bits of classic pickuping that I don't miss. Manual locking front hubs on 4WD systems, for example. That 1980 Power Wagon I learned to drive stick in had those, what a pain in the ass. Because if you're a little thick like Dad and me, you never actually needed them to be locked until you'd driven the damn thing into a spot it couldn't get out of without them, and then you're out there groveling around in the dark and the pouring rain and the mud (or the driving snow and the... well, snow) trying to get those stupid little dials to turn, and of course they don't want to because they're all full of mud (or frozen) and just, just no. :)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.