Odd O'blography

Sears Throwback

A friend and I were lamenting the decline and fall of Sears Roebuck the other day. We agreed that they were once a mainstay of the middle-class lifestyle. I suggested that they were the Amazon of the 20th century. My wife and I shopped regularly at the big Sears in the Overlake Shopping Center in Redmond, Washington. You could get your 10,000 steps in just one circuit of that huge, two-story department store. They had everything from appliances to underwear. And though you might not find a really unusual item in stock, you could order almost anything from their catalog and get it delivered in a week or two. It's a shame that their management couldn't understand and adapt to internet shopping. They already had the warehouses, a huge catalog, and a good reputation for customer service. My friend wistfully recalled the Craftsman brand hand tools and their iron-clad guarantee. And that reminded me of a story.

When I was in high school, my then brother-in-law, Greg Conner, bought a 1950 Ford F5 truck with a dump bed. He got it from a guy who lived near my family in Round Butte. Greg and my sister Linda were living in Camas Prairie at the time, about thirty miles away. Greg was a hard-working logger who didn't like to sit still. For him, The 20 year-old truck was a fun side project that occupied his weekends for a few months. The running gear was mostly sound, but the interior was worn, and the paint was peeling. Greg tuned up the engine and spruced up the exterior. He never got around to the upholstery, but the outside looked pretty good when he was done. Then he realized that he didn't really need a big truck. My dad didn't need a big truck either, but Greg's impulse buy soon became dad's impulse buy. And the 1.5-ton dump capacity came in handy on our small ranch. Dad joked that he'd brought the truck back 'home' to Round Butte, so we named it Homer.

Homer had a flathead V8 that made only 100 HP, but the transmission had a compound low gear that would allow us to pull stumps if we could get enough traction. A friend of a friend once talked my dad into using it to move a small house early one Sunday morning. We didn't have permits or flashing lights, just a pace car with a red rag on a stick waving out the side window. The 700 square-foot building had been jacked up and put on axles the previous day so that we could start at first light. I rode in the cab with Dad, and it took about four hours to make the 25-mile trip over gravel roads. A few early risers were justifiably annoyed by having the road blocked, but nobody called the cops and the house arrived safely at its new location. Homer pulled that house along without complaint, and we were home in time for lunch.

Homer didn't get a lot of road miles, so his tires tended to age out rather than wear out. Either way, a flat is a flat, and one afternoon dad had to deal with a flat on the right rear. And those big dual wheels had split rims that could make tire changing dangerous. Dad had experience as an auto mechanic, so he knew better than to work on a split rim with hand tools. Instead, he decided to take the whole wheel off and have a garage change the flat tire for him. But Homer's wheels hadn't been removed for many years and the giant lug nuts were rusted solidly in place. Dad had a 3/4-inch drive flex handle attached to a 2-inch socket but couldn't get enough leverage to break the nut loose. So, he grabbed a 3-foot length of steel pipe from the junk pile and slid it onto the end of the flex handle. But even with a 'cheater', the lug nut wouldn't budge. At the end, Dad was hanging off the sidewall of the dump bed, swearing and bouncing his full weight up and down on the cheater. Oddly enough, the flex handle broke off at the pivot point behind the socket.

That derailed our plan to get the flat tire fixed, so we went to town to look for a new flex handle. But remember what I said earlier about the Craftsman guarantee? Dad took that broken tool into our local Sears store and showed it to the clerk. The guy didn't bat an eye, he just handed Dad a brand-new flex handle. On the way home, Dad laughed and told me that he'd actually bought the 3/4-inch socket set at a second-hand store. Sears replaced the broken tool with a new one and didn't even ask to see a receipt. Now that was service!


p.s. Dad could be very resourceful when brute strength failed. He used a propane torch to get that lug nut smoking hot. And once it had expanded a bit, it popped loose easily.