Recently, I found a relative of an old friend.
The first car I ever owned was a 1947 Ford Pickup Truck. Well, it was the first car I ever owned, that I could drive; it was the third vehicle I owned. I bought a nice Chevy 6 cylinder Pickup before I got my license, that I horse traded for a Honda motorcycle, that I horse traded for the ’47 Ford. I learned to drive by steering a combine around my uncle’s Milo Maize at harvest in a central Texas summer. But, that’s another story.
Now, before I got the ’47 Ford, my friend had taken the flathead 6 out of it and put in a Chevy 283. A torch cut hole provided room for headers into the fender wells. The headers dropped down to glass pack mufflers, attached to the running boards. There was a Chevy to Ford bell housing over the clutch, allowing the Ford 3 speed manual transmission to be hung back in place. In back was the original 4:11 rear end, on which my friend hung some pretty wide beefy tires. It wasn’t pretty, but it sounded great. It was muscle car enough for me at the end of the summer that I passed the California State driver’s test in 1971.
Fortunately the ’47 Ford had an inspection plate in the center of the cab floorboard. This plate provided easy access to the tranny, which I was to remove several times over the course of the next 2 years. It wasn’t too long before I twisted the gears out of the 4:11 rear end (there wasn’t any top end, but I could come out of the hole and light up the tires any time I wanted to). A nice junk yard man, who I dealt with several times, found me a Cadillac rear end that would bolt up identically. A clutch plate never lasted me very long either. I tired quickly of spending money that was hard to come by, on parts broken by horsing around. But the truck was quick and I had fun.
Two and a half years after I got the pickup, I graduated high school, and flew away to the rest of my life. A few years later as my dad was preparing to move, we agreed to sell the truck if anyone wanted it. I think we got $200 for it. I think I paid $400, so $200 for all that fun and education was well worth it.
