This topic might fall under the category of “it’s a guy thing,” but I find old cars evocative. And the older they are, the more decrepit they are, the less likely they are to ever again drip oil on someone’s garage floor, the more evocative they are.
(Don’t ever go to an auto salvage yard with me. My eyes tend to glaze over, and well after closing time I am found midway down a row of wrecks, softly patting the crumpled fender of some old Chevy and muttering, “There, there, old fellow. There, there.”)
These photos were taken at a recent car swap meet at LaGrave Field.
This old hulk, bless its heart, is legally blind now, probably needs the help of a seeing-eye Dodge to get across the street. But it’s surely got some stories to tell.
For $1,800 you could haul home this late-’30s Ford fixer-upper. It still proudly wears its license plate like a badge. “Farm Truck,” the plate reads. According to the Texas Department of Public Safety, the primary legal uses of a “farm truck” are “Transporting the person’s own poultry, dairy, livestock, livestock products, timber in its natural state, or farm products to market or another place for sale or processing” and “Transporting laborers from their place of residence to the owner’s farm or ranch.”
This one looks like it has hauled a few peas and pickers.
Sure, it’s got Marty Feldman eyes now, but this mangled MGA once was someone’s . . . well, having owned an MG, I’m pretty sure this one once was someone’s royal pain in the boot. But still . . .
My grandparents’ 1941 GMC pickup had a gull-wing hood like this one. As I was growing up, for years that pickup had sat in our back yard on Burton Street, comatose, grass up to its running boards. Then, at age thirteen I declared, “I’ll get ’er runnin’ again. Just you watch.” That pickup was the first motor vehicle I ever spent a pubescent summer tinkering on, alternately cursing it and coddling it. Finally got the engine to run, but the truck never moved an inch. Just plain spiteful. That pickup may still be in that back yard. The subsequent owners of the house probably just mow around it.
