Terry Tales

Studebaker Dreams

I spent the summer I turned fourteen working for my uncle Roy. The cattle market was trending up, and he leased some additional acreage that year to expand his herd. I moved sprinkler pipes and drove tractor in the hayfields. I was still too scrawny to keep up with the men who threw calves for branding or lifted ninety-pound bales over their heads when building haystacks.

There wasn’t any formal agreement on hours or pay, I just went to work as needed and felt very grown-up to do so. The best part of the job was the rusty black 1953 Studebaker pickup that was at my disposal for getting to the various fields where I worked. It had vacuum operated windshield wipers, a ‘three on the tree’ gearshift, and a worn-out steering linkage, but it was a taste of real freedom. No one put any limits on when or where I could go. At least, it seemed that way at the time.

I didn’t have a driver’s license, but I’d already been driving for several years. Most of us farm kids started on the tractor by age eight or ten, and I’d moved on to pickups and farm trucks as soon as I could see over the steering wheel. We lived ten miles from a small town and I could get everywhere I needed to be without ever seeing a cop.

The Studebaker had a tense family history. My black-sheep cousin had convinced uncle Roy to buy the pickup, with the understanding that Jerry would pay him back when he got a job. The job came through, but Jerry didn’t. Uncle Roy lost patience, managed to repossess the pickup, and gave me strict instructions not to lend it to Jerry. As if I’d let that goofball drive my pickup!

I don’t remember how many hours I worked for uncle Roy that summer, maybe two hundred? I had my own chores at home and I still helped with putting up our own hay, of course. I do remember the thrill of watching uncle Roy sign over the pickup’s title to my dad. It was mostly payment for a summer’s worth of labor, but I think it was partially to spite my cousin. Was it worth two hundred hours of hard work? Probably not, but I never let on that I figured I’d put one over on uncle Roy.

Studebakers were just part of growing up for my extended family. My uncle Pat owned a Studebaker dealership, Patton Motors, in the 1950’s, and most of the family bought a car from him at one time or another. It helped that Studebaker offered a lot of low-priced models. Hardly any of our lower middle-class relatives bought from Pat after he switched to selling Chrysler in the 1960’s.

My dad was working for Pat as a mechanic when I was born in 1957. He actually got two babies that year, the other was a Studebaker Silver Hawk. It was a green two-door coupe, with really cool fins on the back. It wasn’t as fast as the Golden Hawk model, but the 289 cubic inch V8 engine had enough power to provide a sporty ride. I loved that car as a child, and I still think it's a very good-looking automobile. I never did risk asking dad which of us was his favorite.

In 1959, dad moved us to the Seattle area, where he found work as a carpenter. He framed houses, built concrete forms for the Highway 520 floating bridge, and worked on the City of Tomorrow exhibit for the 1962 World's Fair. One of the cleverer things he built was a padded insert that fit into the rear floor space of our Hawk. It converted the back seat into a small bed where my older sister and I could sleep while dad made the overnight drive to visit our grandparents in Montana. We also used it when the family went to a drive-in movie.
By 1965, we’d moved back to Montana and our family had grown to include four kids. Dad bought a brown four-door Studebaker Lark from uncle Pat. It wasn’t nearly as pretty, nor as cool, as the Silver Hawk, but it sufficed for several years. When Studebaker finally folded, dad got a blue two-door Lark from Pat for next to nothing. It was worth every penny. I drove the blue Lark once in a while when I was in high school, but the cloud of oil-smoke that followed me around made it a less than pleasant experience.

Dad always had a soft spot for Studebakers and I think he was both amused and pleased by my adventures with the pickup. I’d like to say that it became a lifelong interest and that I learned all about repairing and restoring old cars, but that’s someone else’s story. I just wanted to drive. My dad was a fair mechanic, but we didn’t have much money for new parts. I did the minimum necessary to keep the pickup going and made do with whatever was at hand.

There were a number of old vehicles available for parts in the old pothole, some dating from as far back as the 1930’s. The pothole was created when my uncles tried to dig a stock-watering pond into the top of a small rise about 100 yards from the house. It wouldn’t hold water, but its six-foot depth was perfect for hiding forty years of junked cars from view. Why was it the ‘old’ pothole? I never knew, but that’s what everyone called it.

I mostly scrounged bald tires from those junked cars. I don’t think I ever had a complete set on the pickup that would’ve passed a safety inspection. And, boy, did I get good at changing tires and hot patching inner tubes. I always had two spares in the box and used them both for some trips.

In addition to worn tires, the shock absorbers didn’t, and the steering linkage had several degrees of ‘play’ when changing direction. A previous owner had installed a steering wheel spinner knob and I learned to use it to quickly correct course when a bump caused the front wheels to take an unwanted tack. And, with every sharp bump or sudden change of direction, the truck body would do a rollicking bounce on the leaf springs.

In my mind, I drove to the Grand Canyon, the California Redwoods, or even Niagara Falls. In reality, I drove hundreds of miles that fall without getting more than fifteen miles from home. When winter iced over our gravel roads, the pickup was parked, on advice of parents, to await the spring thaw.

When the warmth of April began to dry out the March mud, I put the pickup’s six-volt battery on the charger overnight. A dribble of gasoline primed the carburetor and it started with surprisingly little trouble. I put the air cleaner back in place, closed the hood, and went for a drive in the sunshine.

About 3 miles along, I noticed the temperature gauge zooming past ‘H’. I decided to pull off the road by an irrigation canal to check the radiator. A couple of wisps of steam were all I could see under the cap. Fortunately, there was a five-gallon bucket in the back that I sometimes used to carry table scraps to the pigs.

It seemed simple enough to me, so I rinsed out the bucket in the canal and brought a couple of gallons of water back to fill the hissing radiator. It turned out that two gallons wasn’t enough, so I made a second trip and came back with a nearly full bucket. I poured another three or four gallons into the radiator before I noticed the stream of water running out from under the truck. Duh! It was running out just as fast as I was pouring it in. The engine had pretty well cooled down by the time I figured this out, so I said ‘what the heck’ and drove it home.
It turned out that the anti-freeze hadn’t been up to the challenge of a cold Montana winter. One of the freeze plugs had popped out of the engine casting. It saved the engine block from breaking, but left behind a silver-dollar size hole where the coolant could run out. As luck would have it, the missing plug was at the rear of the engine block, facing the firewall. A lesser mechanic might have concluded that the engine would have to come out to get access, but not my dad. He bought what’s known as a Welch plug and we carried on.

A Welch plug is made of soft metal and shaped like a dome. It sits snugly in a hole with the dome facing outward. A few taps with a hammer will collapse the dome, expand the edges of the plug, and create a secure seal in the casting hole. I could reach up between the engine and the firewall to insert the plug, but there wasn’t any space to swing a hammer. Dad solved the problem with his power drill. He drilled a hole through the firewall perfectly in line with the Welch plug. A long bolt served to transfer the hammer blows to the plug, and my Studebaker pickup was soon back on the road. A short, round-head bolt filled the hole in the firewall. It almost looked factory stock.

I turned 15 in May of 1972 and my newfound ‘maturity’ came with new interests like girls and Rock ‘n’ Roll music. My Studebaker pickup hadn’t come with a radio, of course, so I scrounged one from the junked cars in the old dry pothole. My search was limited to a narrow range of cars: old enough to have a six-volt electrical system, but new enough to have a radio. I don’t remember the car I found, but it had a radio, complete with built-in speaker, as a self-contained unit. It was perfect for my purpose. Most surprising of all, it still worked.

The technology of 1950’s radio required vacuum tubes, and vacuum tubes require 250 volts DC. This could be provided by a simple transformer/rectifier circuit in a 110-volt AC tabletop radio, but how do you step up a six-volt DC battery? The ingenious solution was a mechanical ‘vibrator’ that simulated AC current by breaking the six-volt DC circuit path sixty times a second. It was basically just a relay wired to open its own coil when power was applied. One set of relay contacts would close to send power to the transformer and another set would open to remove power from the relay coil. The relay would rapidly alternate positions as long as power was supplied to the radio. The buzzing of the vibrator relay was clearly audible if the radio volume was turned down with the engine off, but it was drowned out when roaring down the road with 6 cylinders making 80 horsepower.

The biggest challenge was that my pickup didn’t have a dashboard like modern cars. The few instruments were installed directly into the firewall with their connecting wires visible under the hood. Since there was no feasible way to mount the radio on the firewall, I used some baling twine and tied it next to me in the middle of the bench seat. I’d also taken the fender mounted antenna when I grabbed the radio unit. A couple of new holes in the pickup cab allowed me to mount the antenna and run the antenna cable behind the seat to the radio. The small hole we’d drilled in the firewall to access the freeze plug turned out to be perfect for running power wires into the cab.

The lash-up must have looked ridiculous, but it worked like a dream. I had my tunes on all summer as I cruised around pretending to be cool. Looking back, I can hardly believe it was even possible. Delicate vacuum tubes and a mechanical vibrator don’t seem well suited for bouncing around in a moving vehicle.

My fifteenth summer was full of sun and freedom. When I wasn’t busy around the ranch, I tooled around the general area in the pickup. I frequently took my sisters, Laurie and Marcia, down to our favorite swimming hole at the Flathead River.

The quarter-mile downhill grade to the river is gravel and covered with washboard bumps. It’s cut into a clay bank on one side with a drop of a hundred feet on the other. With its worn-out suspension, the pickup danced madly over the washboard, rarely in full contact with the road. I always tried to take it slow, but our speed would inevitably increase as we bounced along. Stepping on the brakes had little effect, it just made steering more difficult. The fishtail motion raised my heart rate, but we never quite went over the edge.

The real excitement came one day when I pulled over into the wide spot above the river where we always parked. It’s about twenty feet above the river and graded smooth, with enough room for several cars. My foot went all the way down to the floorboards with no reaction whatsoever from the brakes. There was barely room, but I twisted the steering wheel frantically to the left and felt the pickup tilt onto the right-side tires as we slalomed back onto the road and coasted to a stop.

‘Why’d you do that?’ asked Laurie indignantly.

She thought I was just trying to be funny and had no idea that we’d very nearly rolled into the river! It took a few minutes for me to recover my composure and get us turned around, but we went swimming anyway and enjoyed the afternoon. I drove home cautiously, using low gear to slow down and the emergency brake to stop. In the end, it became a learning experience as my dad taught me how to replace the leaky seals in the brake system master cylinder.

Summer heat eased into the golden light of fall, and once we were back in school, I signed up for Drivers Ed. Yeah, it seemed kind of redundant, but I could get a real driver’s license at fifteen and a half if I passed Drivers Ed. The only problem was that the class was taught by Mr. Gallagher, in the early morning, before our regular classes. The only feasible solution was for me to drive myself to school so I could take Drivers Ed. I didn’t want to arouse suspicion, so I parked my Studebaker a few blocks away and surreptitiously walked to the high school parking lot. I later found out that pretty much everyone knew what was going on, but no one ratted me out. Just one of the advantages of growing up in a small town.

Drivers Ed turned out to be a useful course of instruction, and I learned a lot, despite my arrogant assumption that I already knew how to drive. Truthfully, there’s a very big difference between steering and driving. Mr. Gallagher took it seriously, teaching us to be courteous on the road while driving defensively. He wasn’t shy about pointing out our errors, and emphasized major corrections with a swat from his clipboard.

The local Ford dealer donated a nice LTD for the school’s use, and it was the first time that I ever drove an automatic. When it was my turn behind the wheel, Mr. Gallagher told me to go ahead and start it up. I looked down hesitantly at the floorboards, fishing around with my left foot.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“I can’t find the clutch,” I replied.

Whack!

In my defense, the Studebaker pickup had a starter button on the floorboard, under the clutch pedal. It was sort of a safety feature. The starting procedure was to turn the ignition on, pull the choke knob out, hold the brake with your right foot and then push the clutch all the way to the floor with your left. The simplicity of merely turning the key in the LTD was stunning.

I completed the Drivers Ed course satisfactorily and passed my driver’s test in the spring. The pickup had been parked again over the winter, and I had some difficulty getting it going. The battery had gotten pretty weak, so I now needed a jump to get it started when cold. The engine would turn over easily when warm, but I learned to park at the top of a hill so I could do a ‘bump start’ if necessary.

Our driveway had a slight downward slope, and the road had an even steeper downhill grade if I turned out to the right, so I could almost always get the pickup started that summer. Sure, it would have been easier to buy a new battery, but that would take cash I didn't have. And, anyway, the battery worked just fine once the engine was running!

The old Studebaker pickup lost its appeal once I could legally borrow a ‘good’ car from my parents. I drove it less and less as the year wore on. That fall, it was relegated to the old pothole, and I never started it again.

It wasn’t quite the end of the pickup, though. A few years later, the local Postmaster struck up a conversation with my dad about cars. He liked Studebakers too, and was excited when he found out that we had a ’53 pickup in near-running order. I knew that I was never going to restore it, so Bob got an old project truck and I got a crisp new $100 bill. I can’t say that I miss that rattling, bouncing, pile of rust, but I’m glad that it went to a good home.