MY DAD'S PICK-UP TRUCK

By: Dan Jensen

Taken from the book CARIBBEAN MEMORIES by Dan Jensen
The Company, Lago, provided my father with a pick-up truck.  Many of the employees were supplied with a Company Vehicle.  Some were issued Cushman scooters, other were given Ford pick-up trucks and a few drove Ford automobiles.  The four wheel vehicles were all painted black, the scooters were all painted yellow.  All these vehicles were intended for business use only, family members were not allowed to drive the vehicles.  The vehicles had "ESSO" license plates.  These plates were restricted to inside the Lago Compound, employees could not drive the vehicles outside the fence.
The cars, truck and scooters were maintained by the Garage but replacement of the vehicles was determined by Lago's Accounting Office.  The accountants did not look at the individual vehicle, they looked at the group, when they were purchased determined when they could be written off.  My father explained to me that this write-off date or economical life was based on past repair records, cost of maintaining a shop, cost of spare parts inventory, and cost of keeping qualified employees on staff to perform the work of keeping the vehicles running.  Somehow, after factoring all these variables into a formula the Accounting Department arrived at two years as the useful life of a Ford pick-up truck in Aruba.  This made no sense to me.
My Dad drove his truck to and from work in the morning and at night and to and from work and home for lunch in the middle of the day.  These trips covered a distance of not more than twelve miles a day.  On Saturday he worked half day so this day added six miles.  Maybe two times a week he drove the truck to the Esso Club, that was two and a half miles round trip, adding an additional five miles a week.  Now we have a total of seventy one miles a week.  At the end of two years the truck would have less then 8,000 miles on the odometer, it was still a new truck in my book, but in the books Lago kept, it was ready to be disposed of.
Lago supplied about five hundred employees with pick-ups, not to mention the dozen or so Ford sedans and about six hundred Cushman scooters.  Every two years they replaced the rolling stock that provided the transportation for the employees.  To add further frustration to the matter , they would not sell the old truck or the old scooters.  The story was the Dutch Government forbid Lago to sell the used, two year old pick-ups, scooters and sedans.  The reason given was that the sale of so many vehicles on the small local market would destroy the local sales of vehicles.  Well, ship them back to the States and sell them on the US Market.  No, shipping five hundred pick-ups, six hundred scooters and twelve sedans back to the United States was cost prohibitive; so another solution had to be found for disposing of these obsolete vehicles.  At Lago, the committee was the answer to all problems, this solution could only have come from a committee.
THE VEHICLES WERE DUMPED INTO THE OCEAN!
As new replacement vehicles arrived they were assigned to an employee and his old truck, automobile or scooter was loaded onto a barge, the barge was pulled by a tug boat out into the deep water off the coast of Aruba and there the vehicles were pushed into the sea.  One by one, they sank into the deep, dark blue Caribbean.  In those days there was no thought given to pollution, or environmental concerns for the ocean. The batteries remained in the vehicles as well as all the fluids. The committee considered the sea floor a good dumping ground.
I had no concern for the sea, I had concern for Lago's Accounting Department and the committee that made that decision.  I thought they were off their rocker!  I felt it they could not sell the vehicles locally, then give them to me and the other kids in the Colony, we could put them to good use.  Naturally, they did not listen to me.  Someone did manage to get a Cushman scooter.  How he got it, I do not know, but he got it.  I remember the scooter.  It did not have a body, the metal cover over the engine, which supported the seat and had a built-in storage box on the back, was missing.  To replace the metal body he had built a tubular frame to support a seat.  I always thought it was a great scooter and often wished it were mine.
I did have a car, or maybe I should say a jalopy.  It was a 1946 or 1947 Ford with a very rusty body, what was left of the body.  The back end of the car had rusted through, so I removed it, from the firewall and windshield back the body was gone, no doors and no roof.  In their place I had built a sort of wooden truck box.  The car was in need of many parts.  The radiator was more Permatex, lead solder and cement than cooling tubes.  The inside of the radiator was filled with black pepper, corn meal and Stop Leak, and still the damn thing leaked.  The car ran hot all the time and many a day it overheated to the point of boiling over.  I always carried jugs of water to fill radiator.  The engine knocked, actually it was more of a BANG-BANG-BANG, as the connecting rods slapped around on the crankshaft.  The breaks were hydraulic, however all the wheel cylinders leaked, the break linings were soaked in hydraulic fluid and although the car would usually stop, I could never lock the wheels and skid to a stop, the car just sort of slowed to a stop, and this only happened because you pushed the break peddle with all your might.  I had rebuilt the carburetor so many times the jets were stripped, so they did not seat.  The little hole in the brass jets had been cleaned so many times they were enlarged.  The idle screws were blunt, so you could no longer adjust the idle properly.  The engine loped at a fast idle, and many times it didn't run at all.
The car was a piece of junk!
One Friday, at the lunch table, my Father announced he was getting a new pick-up on Monday.
This news excited me.  The little wheels in my teen-age, car-crazy brain began to turn.  Then they began to spin, I had a great idea.
"How does that work."  I asked.
"What do you mean, how does that work, I get a new pick-up, that's how it works.? He replied.
"I mean, do you take your truck to the garage and they give you a new one."
"Well, no. They will probably bring the new truck to the office and take my old truck back to the garage." He answered.
"Well, when do they take the trucks to the barge?" I asked.  I know about the dumping in the sea.
"They assemble the obsolete trucks at the garage."  He said.  "When they have enough to fill a barge and it looks like a calm day, they load the barge and take it out to dump the vehicles."
My brain was dismantling my Father's truck and my car, then I was putting them back together again, checking each part and switched the good parts with the bad parts.  I knew that most of the parts on my '46 would interchange with my Dad's truck, they both had flat head V-8 engines, hydrolic breaks and the same type of steering.
"How about I switch a couple of parts from your pick-up to my car over the week-end?"  I asked, "I could sure use a few parts for my car."
"What sort of parts are you thinking about?" My Dad asked me.
"Oh, I don't know, maybe the coil, the carburetor and the battery." I replied.
"Just make sure my truck starts and runs on Monday morning." Was all he said.
I could not believe my Dad said that.  This was not like my Dad, he was a "Company Man", he did not break the rules.
When my Dad arrived home a little after noon on Saturday, I was ready.  I drove his truck into the back yard, my car was already in the back yard, up on block, I had been working on my car since three-thirty Friday afternoon, when I got home from school.
I put my Dad's truck up on blocks and removed the real end, spring, drive shaft and with that came the breaks and drums.  Then I dropped the entire front end, spring, shocks, tie rods, front axle, breaks and front wheel drums.
These components were already off of my car.  I switched them.  Then I started on the steering column.  The steering wheel and lock assembly were different, but the rest of the parts were interchangeable.  When I finished my steering was tight.  It felt and drove like a new car, however the steering on my Dad's truck now had over half a turn of play in the wheel.
I deflated the tires, and removed the tires form the rims, switched tires and inner tubes, then I pumped up all ten tires, by hand.  Ten tires?, Yes, I also switched the spares.  My Dad's spare had never been on the ground.  I switched tires but not rims because my rims were rusty, his were not.  I wanted his truck to look like it always did, new.
With the wheels back on the two vehicles I moved them to an A-frame with a Come-A-Long and switched engines.  With the engine out of his truck I noticed the master break cylinders were the same, so I switched them.
By Sunday afternoon the job was complete.
I looked at the two vehicles.  What else could I use off the pick-up before it with into the sea.  I didn't have a glove box in my car.  The heavy cardboard box had gotten wet many times it had fallen apart.  I emptied the contents of the glove box in the pick-up and removed the cardboard glove box and installed it in my car.  Now, when you open the door on the glove box in my Dad's truck you saw the firewall.  I had put the contents of his glove box in a cardboard box so t took the contents of his glove box in the house and announced I had emptied it for him.
The pick-up ran, but it would not start with my battery.  I decided to get up early on Monday morning and start the truck for my Dad, then after the engine was running, I would switch batteries. This I did.
When my Dad left for work on Monday morning he had to know he was driving a piece of junk.  With loose steering, bad breaks, engine temperature on HOT, very fast, loping idle and a constant knock, he made it to work.  From all outward appearance the truck looked like it always did, new, but under that black exterior, it was another story.
That Monday noon my Dad arrived home for lunch with a new, black, Ford pick-up tuck.  It had the Lago logo oval on the door and Instrument Department printed under the company logo.
"My old tuck would not start when they came to pick it up at the office." he told me.
"Really." I said.
"Yes," he said. "Since I have had that tuck that is the only time it would not start."
"What did you do?" I asked.
"Nothing, the men from the garage went and got a new battery and put it in the truck, it started with the new battery."
I thought, "damn, a new battery, and now it is going into the sea.  I could have used that new battery, my battery is two years old".
I liked my Dad's new truck, it had an overhead valve engine. Unfortunately there had been many model changes made in the design, it would have taken a lot of work to switch engines in two years, when it too went into the sea, with 8000 miles on the odometer.
My old car ran like new until I left Aruba and I sold it to some other kid.

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