The Life of Me: An Autobiography

by Clarence Edgar Johnson

The fenders on the old truck, just in normal driving, flopped like a crow's wings trying to fly upstream in a sandstorm. The engine hood had the sides removed to let more air through, and the top part of the hood was tied on with haywire. Now, when our front fenders came in contact with the Ford car and the wagon wheel, they went way up and came way back down, and their flopping broke the wire that held the hood on. I thought sure the hood would blow up against the windshield, but it didn't.

The old truck had no doors, just curtains, and they were not in use. I grabbed a left hand full of windshield post, stepped my right foot out on the running board, leaned out over the hood and wrestled it back down into place. I was the main reason it didn't blow up against the windshield.

We didn't lose any speed, so by the time I got the parts of the hood back into place we were too far away to see whether the farmers were angry, disgusted, or just plain surprised—more than likely all three.

This little incident took place a couple of miles out of Stamford on our way to Hamlin. This was Earl's daily run, but on this particular day Earl had more freight than he could haul and had phoned for us to come to Stamford for the second load. Joel and I had driven over and got it.

When we got to Hamlin with our load we told Earl what had happened. And the next day, Earl was stopped and confronted by two not-so-happy farmers. They seemed to think that he was the one who had done unto them what Joel and I had done. But Earl convinced them that it couldn't have been him, he was in Hamlin at that time of the day, and he could prove it. Moreover, he drove a Dodge truck, not a Maxwell. Thanks to Earl, they never did learn who ran their little roadblock.

On another occasion, Earl and I were going back home from somewhere in an empty truck and Earl was driving. But then when he discovered a bumblebee in the cab with us, it only took Earl about two seconds to quit driving. In that two seconds he pulled the emergency brake lever back as far as he could and the ratchet held it there. Then he opened his door with his left hand, stepped his left foot out on the runningboard, his right foot shoved the brake pedal down and his right hand steered the truck while it hurried to a sliding stop. Neither of us got stung and the bee got away. But the big surprise was the sudden appearance of a whole flock of red apples rolling along the road from behind us, some of them continuing on their way down the road ahead of us.

Then suddenly there was this stranger getting out of his pickup truck—the pickup that had bumped into the back of our truck, the pickup that had been loaded with big red apples. The stranger came up to Earl and asked why he had stopped so quickly right in the middle of the road without any warning. Earl seemed to be completely out of good answers at the time. So he sort of hesitated and sheepishly looked around as if searching for some kind of an answer, and there it was as big as day—a railroad across the road in front of us with the usual sign reading, STOP, LOOK, and LISTEN. Earl pointed to the sign and told the man he was obeying the sign. The stranger calmed down, and he and his boys began picking up apples.

We would haul just about anything in those days if it wasn't against the law. One time Earl and I loaded a truck with East Texas ribbon cane molasses from a railroad car in Hamlin and helped the owner peddle it from town to town. He didn't sell it all the first day so we stayed over in Throckmorton that night. Earl and I slept in the back of the truck on the cases of molasses. We spread a couple of quilts under us and a couple over us, then we spread a tarp over the quilts and molasses and all. Next morning we also had a couple of inches of snow on top of the tarp. Rough, you say? Sure, a little, but it sure beat hauling maize all to pieces.

While the others of us were doing all this hauling, Frank had opened a garage in Hamlin and was doing mechanical work. One day Frank was going to be away and he asked me to take over for him that day. There was only one mechanical job to do, unless others showed up. It was an Overland Whippet with a loose timing chain. The loose chain had let the camshaft get out of time with the crankshaft. Frank asked me to fix it for the man.

He explained to me that the way to do the job was to take the radiator off, take the front end of the motor loose from the frame, jack up the motor, take off the timing gear cover, put the sprockets back in proper timing, and then replace all that stuff I had taken off.