Terry Tales

Sears Throwback

A friend and I were lamenting the decline and fall of Sears Roebuck the other day. We agreed that it was once a mainstay of the middle-class American lifestyle. As a child, I used to squabble with my sisters over who would get first dibs on the Christmas Wish Book to circle the toys we wanted from Santa. As an adult, my wife and I shopped at the big Sears store near 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 it from their catalog and get it delivered in a week or two. In olden days you could order an entire two-bedroom house and have it delivered by rail car (unassembled of course).

I suggested to my friend Gerry that Sears was the Amazon of the 20th century. And it's a shame that their management couldn't adapt to the internet. They already had warehouses, a huge catalog, and a reputation for good customer service. Gerry wistfully recalled their Craftsman brand hand tools with the 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 not too far from my family in Round Butte, Montana. 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 the engine and spruced up the exterior with a snazzy new paint job. He never got around to the cracked brown 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 became Dad's impulse buy. And Homer’s 1.5-ton capacity dump bed came in handy sometimes on our small ranch. Dad joked that he'd brought the old truck back home to Round Butte, so we named it Homer.

Homer had a flathead V8 that made only 100 hp, but the transmission fed into a transfer case with a compound low gear that would allow us to pull stumps (if we could only get enough traction). A friend of a friend once talked Dad into using Homer to move a small house on a 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 sq. ft. 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 3 hours to make the 25-mile trip over mostly 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 performed like a champ. He pulled that house along without complaint, and we were home in time for a late 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 we had to deal with one on the right rear. And the big dual wheels had split rims that made tire changing a dangerous enterprise. Dad was an experienced 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 he couldn't get enough leverage to break the nuts 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 nuts wouldn't budge. At the end, Dad was hanging off the sidewall of the dump bed, swearing like the sailor he used to be, and bouncing his full weight up and down on the cheater. Oddly enough, the flex handle broke apart 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 instead. 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!

But what about the flat tire, you may ask? Well, Dad could be very resourceful when brute strength failed. He finally used a propane torch to get the lug nuts smoking hot. And once they expanded a bit, they popped loose easily.

A few years later, I got married to a local girl and it turned out that she knew Homer from her childhood. Ray Newton, the guy who sold Homer to Greg, lived about a mile from Debbie’s parents. Ray’s wife, Pearl, considered Debbie to be an ‘adopted’ granddaughter. Deb spent a lot of time with Pearl and Ray, and she has fond memories of climbing up into that high cab and going for a ride. She has less fond memories of picking rocks from Ray’s wheat field. He’d inch along in that compound low gear while Debbie and her siblings tossed rocks into the dump bed. Then all the kids would climb on and stand behind the cab while Ray drove back to the house. Deb told us that Ray’s truck had been red back then, but the new paint job couldn’t hide the essential Homer. We were all tickled by the odd coincidence, and our son Gene enjoyed climbing up into grandpa’s big yellow truck every bit as much as Deb had when it was Ray’s and red.