Tales from the Attic: Learning to drive on a farm

Sam Smith - One of the unfading influences in my life was serving as one of my parents' first Maine farm hands. Admittedly I only had three pigs to feed every day using some garbage I brought up to the big barn from my parent's house. I also had to bring large ice blocks kept under a big pile of sawdust back to the house to power the icebox because in the late 1940s and early 1950s we not only didn't have phone service, we didn't have electricity. 

But the real payoff for me was that my father let his farm manager - James Mann -  teach me by the age of 14 how to drive the army surplus personnel carrier with the front-end winch and A-frame. I was double-clutching and shifting into six-wheel drive and using a winch to haul things out of places long before I was able to drive legally on Maine roads beyond the farm. Jimmy Mann remains in my soul one of my best teachers.  

As my brother Lewis later recalled, "You couldn't go directly from one gear to another but had to go into neutral first, let the clutch all the way out and accelerate or brake the motor before shifting again, depending on the direction of the shift. The maneuver also required one to take into account the load on the truck, its speed and the grade of the road."

The truck was a marvelous machine that lasted for decades. It withstood all punishment including my father's attempt to launch a boat by towing it out on to the mudflats. The truck, of course, became deeply mired, but the winch eventually pulled the vehicle back to dry land.
The Army truck was just one of a fleet of amazing vehicles that kept the farm going, ranging from the practical to the insane. For example. my father obtained the local Railway Express truck from Clarence Bolster, a familiar figure at the local railroad station. It was, however, short on brakes. Asked how one operated such a vehicle, Jim Degrandpre explained, "You planned ahead." Jim's brothers, Richard and David, also converted the family 1952 DeSoto station wagon into a monster tractor, one of several such homemade vehicles.
 
None of this surprised me much. After all, when I accompanied my parents to France as a college student, our rented Simca had failed some miles from the nearest village. It turned out to be a broken accelerator rod. My father had me stand on the front bumper with the car's hood up adjusting the speed of the car by hand as he stuck his head out the window and steered it.