In 1991, my father-in-law and two brothers-in-law loaded in my 1988 Astro conversion van and headed to Lawton, Oklahoma, to visit my brother-in-law in the army. I started looking around for a Chevy without much luck, but found this truck in the newspaper in Wichita Falls, Texas. We took a ride down to check it out and made a deal with the old gent for $1,400. He had too much arthritis to shift it and when it was retired, town employees got the first chance to buy it. He was a maintenance man for the school. The truck had a jammed left box side from being parked in the garage when the garage roof came down in a tornado.
The truck had a large rack that went the whole length of the truck that had saved the rest of the truck, a large steel I beam bumper on the back and a large wooden toolbox where the second fuel tank had been mounted in the bed. We drove it back to Oklahoma trouble-free with lots of stuff flying out, as the tail pipe had not been warmed up in years. We started driving back to Vermont and the exhaust burned off at the manifold. After driving for a while we decided this wasn’t going to work. We rented a tow dolly, hooked it up to the Astro and made it back after some long, slow hills. I fixed the exhaust, installed new motor mounts, removed the rack and toolbox and used it to pull our 1968 pop-up camper. In the spring of 1993, I took the truck apart to restore it. The water stains on the headliner are from little Steven’s footprints as he ran across the wet paint.
I have shown the truck at many shows including Pigeon Forge, TN, Carlisle, PA, MA, CT, NY, NH, VT, and Granby, Quebec in 2004, where I was asked to go off-site for a magazine shoot. About the time I forgot about it, I received a Nitro Magazine in October of 2005 and they had done a bunch of stuff on Ford trucks and mine was featured with 4 pages. At one of the Granby shows the Ford dealer offered me a new Ford truck for it! The gold color was a summer-only color for 1964. Down south they painted the tops white to keep them cool. Up north they two-toned them to enhance the chrome. Tinted windows were only available in the south. It’s been 35 years of fun and the new paint job is 33 years old.
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