Get yourself a Diet Pepsi and some nachos and settle down for a wild truck ride with Mil...and oh yes, hang onto your pants! I'm fixin' to tell you some stories!
Why in the world do you think I am such a fan of that great History Channel program, "The Ice Road Truckers?" No, it is not just because they have a cute "girl trucker" on there; it is because I used to be a trucker myself--- a WHEAT TRUCKER!
It all started this way...After WWII, my dad, worn out from seven years of running a steam laundry in CLOVIS, N.M. all by himself--with never a vacation, decided to change occupations. (To add to the stress, those years, from 1941-45 saw the building of the Clovis Army Air Base west of town. With all these soldiers in town, the laundry had all the clothes it could do for a week by Mondays at noon.)
So my dad had bought a half section of land a mile from Ranchvale, N.M. Note, a section of land is one mile square-- thus a half section is a mile long and a half mile wide. Starting from scratch at farming, we had no truck or pickup. Equipment and barrels of gasoline were hauled in an old trailer behind our trusty dark blue Master Deluxe 1941 Chevrolet, which had lasted us throughout the war.
One day when I was thirteen and "helping" my dad out there with small gofer jobs, he had to move the tractor and plow away across to the east side of that one mile long piece of land. He didn't want to have to walk back to retrieve the car and trailer...and thus right there I learned to drive. Yes, "he threw me into the pool!" He started the old Chevrolet for me, put me into the driver's seat, and somehow I got it into gear (with that atrocious vacuum shift), let out the clutch, and miraculously took off across that terraced soft bumpy land.
The 1941 Chevy had a pull throttle and I just pulled it out to the max, not knowing anything about floor accelerators, I went flying across there lickety-split and made it to the other side of the field. Instead of using the brake, I just simply turned off the key! Smart, eh?
So, that story is told so that you will be amazed to hear that within rwo years, I would be riding a combine, driving a tractor, and driving a big wheat truck holding 18,000 lbs. of wheat---to the grain elevator west of town.
The summer of 1949 saw a huge bumper wheat crop for the whole Eastern New Mexico area. The wheat elevators in every town--Clovis, Melrose, San Jon--all over--were backed up with trucks waiting to unload their wheat. The elevators were all full and waiting for trains to come, and carry away the surplus wheat.
Dad bought a brand new two-and-a-half ton wheat truck with a bright barn-red bed on the back. Visualize a very big pickup-looking vehicle with a long-wide bed about four feet deep. It had a thick steel bar across the middle to prevent bulging. The rig had six big tires. About 15,000 lbs. was a pretty good load for this truck but I was handed weight receipts at the elevator with more than 18,000 lbs. delivered--several times.
But I am getting ahead of myself...You see, a farmer works all year, planting, hoping for rain, crossing his fingers that the crop will "come in" okay, and thus have a living for his family for another year; he watches the weather and prays--then about June, when the wheat is ready to cut, he will work day and night to get it harvested. A HAILSTORM COULD WIPE HIM OUT! And very fast at that. Neighbors often help each other get the harvest in.
So, while my dad kept the combine rolling and continued cutting wheat, he came up with the idea that I would become a 15-year-old wheat trucker. So in those early farming days before self-propelled combines and modern dumping methods, one would just ease the truck in to the combine, right side of the bed under the bin; then someone would lift the lever and all the grain would slide out into the truck. It held maybe 10 bins of grain.
With the truck loaded out in the middle of the field on the soft dirt, I had to start it rolling in compound gear ("Granny" gear, "we truckers" called it.) No, there was no "peeling out." Once you got on harder ground and picked up some momentum you could shift to low, second and on up. May I modestly say, with a little credit to myself, that I was a careful driver.
By this time we owned more land north of town and the trip to town from this farm required going across a deep draw on the highway. (It certainly seemed deep to me driving that bulging, sluggish truck!) To an auto, it was nothing. Anyway, loaded with wheat, I eased over the lip of that draw, realizing that I could pick up speed and start weaving and swaying, and perhaps burn out the brakes trying to contol that big heavy truck-- and pile up at the bottom in a heap! Also, I didn't want any blowouts going at full speed.
Thus I invented the "Mil Maneuver," (sometimes called the "Chicken Maneuver.") Here it is: As I went over the lip of the draw and looked steeply downward to the bottom, I braked and put the truck into second. Then on picking up speed, I tapped the brake, picked up more speed, tapped the brakes again..and so on...four or five times. I was in CONTROL! Oh JOY! No pile-ups, and luckily no other teen-agers were watching! BUT, there is a cause and effect; in everything there is a reckoning. Mine came in trying to figure out how to get that big truck up a half mile of steep, steep hill!
So as I approached the level-off and crossed the bridge, I was giving the truck all the gas I could. Then went to high gear, but that didn't last long, and had to hit second but that didn't last long either; I began to die, and hit low, double-clutching all the way, as "we truckers" were wont to do. It is embarrassing to say, that I had to go to compound gear for the last few hundred feet! Messy trucking? Er, yes, but I'm still here!
Trucking was exciting but it had its downsides, such as the hay fever from being around the dust and pollen. Also like the time we had about 16,000 lbs.on the truck and it started raining out in the middle of the soft field. Then we discovered that an inside rear tire was flat.
I will close with this trucker story. Luckily, and thanks to the Lord, I never had any accidents or mishaps--except one. This happened to ME, and not the truck. After dumping my load of wheat at the elevator west of town one hot summer afternoon...sneezing and wheezing from all that wheat dust that blows around elevators, I realized that the truck had a nearly empty gas tank. We bought our gas from an old friend whose company was located near the underpass on the southeast side of Clovis. We will call our old friend Cletus.
I drove over there and eased the truck in by the pump. Cletus and I chatted easily as he was filling the gas tank right behind the cab. I, standing nearby, was relaxing. Somehow during this operation, the hose came out or Cletus failed to get it turned off in a timely way. I was suddenly deluged with two or three gallons of gas all over my body from the waist down. It went all over my jeans, shoes, and everything in that area. I was soaked!
Cletus immediately felt terrible and apologized. He said: "What'll we do?" Quickly surveying the situation and knowing Cletus smoked, I said: "Well, don't light a cigarette!" Secondly I said: "I don't have any spare jeans with me. " And thirdly, "I think it will just evaporate quickly." (WRONG!) So I signed the gasoline ticket and took off on the eight mile run back to the farm.
I was barely out of town on the Grady highway when my body started to burn. The farther I went, the more I burned. Friends, it sounds funny now, but it was a serious problem. I pulled the truck off the road just north of town, opened every window, big and little, and made some drastic sartorial adjustments. Suffice it to say: It was the .only time in my stellar trucking career that I ever arrived back at the farm with my pants around my ankles!
So goes the life and times of a fifteen-year-old wheat trucker in the forties.
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By Mil
4/19/12
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