Lot's of different pics of this sign.

Lot's of different pics of this sign.
"I don't make hell for nobody. I'm only the instrument of a laughing providence. Sometimes I don't like it myself, but I couldn't help it if I was born smart."

1st Sgt. Milton Anthony Warden.
"From here to Eternity"

Paul Valery

"You are in love with intelligence, until it frightens you. For your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint. Your acts of pity and cruelty are absurd, committed with no calm, as if they were irresistible. Finally, you fear blood more and more. Blood and time."

The Wisdom of the Ages

"When a young man, I read somewhere the following: God the Almighty said, 'All that is too complex is unnecessary, and it is simple that is needed',"

Mikhail Kalashnikov
"Here lies the bravest soldier I've seen since my mirror got grease on it."

Zapp Brannigan

Sunday, September 14, 2008

Trick Trux


I actually wrote most of this last night only to have it disappear into computerland.
Who cares, right?
I've just gotten over a brief and instructive obsession concerning the vehicles pictured - a military adaptation in particular.
To begin, the top photo is my Dad's truck.

See, here's a place where our hard line between "pickup" and "truck" blurs.
"Old Faithful" (the Daddy's name for it - naming cars/trucks... embarrassing) was a half-ton, but had a stake bed so...
I'm in the photo if my Mom's caption is to be believed. The driver is my older brother so I assume somewhere in all the glare and shadows, I may have been visible when she took the picture but I'll be damned if I can see anybody there.
Taken, probably in 1957 when I was three.
This is the grill design Chevy used between 1941 and 46.
Next picture, a 1 1/2 ton model.
These seem to have been very popular. You can still see them around sometimes.
When I first moved to Oregon after the Navy, my first job was for a firewood guy.
The oldest of his fleet of three trucks was a ton and a half Chevy.
It didn't burn-up the road by any means but it was cool nonetheless. The bitchin' windshield that cranks out, the starter switch on the floor - and gears so low that the starter could move it in low. I didn't do such a horrible thing to it. It my teenaged co-worker.
Now a brief digression: Below is a picture of the predecessor, once removed to the humvee.
In the Navy we called them "weapons carriers" but I've heard other folks referred to them as "five-quarters".
It always struck me as being very practical, to just go with the basic body, such as it is, rather than reinventing the wheel. I don't know if American Motors made any 1 1/4 ton trucks for the civilian market and this probably only existed as a contracted "tactical vehicle".
I just always thought that the coolness factor was upped significantly by the look of the thing, kind of a tactical Mad Max.

Okay, apply the same principle to the truck with the huge mouthful of teeth, in this case a 1941 Canadian Chevy with right-hand-drive and you get the next rig, as used by the British Long Range Desert Group in North Africa.

I'll finish the rest of this later, maybe put it in two chunks as it's getting a bit large.
Later






































2 comments:

Assrot said...

Some nice old trucks. They bring back a lot of fond memories of my younger days.

I especially like the old rust buckets. It would be fun to fix one up and drive it around again. I did that as a hobby for about a decade back in my mid 30s.

I would see some old rust bucket sitting in a field somewhere and stop to see if I could find the owner and see if he wanted to sell.

I got a few free trucks that way and had a grand old time fixing them up and eventually reselling them. It's darn hard to find parts these days and I'm to damn old to crawl around under the hood and chassis of a truck anymore.

Cool pictures though.

Joe

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the link to the LRDG blog. New one on me.

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