One-Ton Fun: The Summer I Learned to Love Ford Trucks
Driving a Ford one-ton turned a 16 year city kid into a truck lover.
The summer after I turned 16, I got a job with a landscaping company. A city kid raised on Road and Track magazine, I thought of myself as a car guy. Trucks didn’t interest me. But that was about to change.
Not long after I started, the foreman came in from a job and tossed me the keys to his truck. “Go wash it” he said. Those were his first words to me. Eager to impress him and scared of pissing him off, I caught the keys and ran out to the lot. His truck was a dark green, early 80’s Ford F-150. It had hubcaps, a tan interior, and a manual transmission.
I ran back inside and told him I didn’t know how to drive a stick. “Then you’d better learn,” he said, and turned back to his drafting table. Fortunately, washing his truck meant cleaning fast food containers out of his cab and hosing out the bed. I could do that in back at the shop, but I had to get it over a slight hill. After stalling the truck five or six times, at least twice in the wrong gear, I managed to coax the truck to the shop.
Several of the other trucks were like the foreman’s. Basic F-150s, either red, green, or white, some with automatics and some with manuals. In short order, I’d mastered the stick. The F-150 is easy to learn on, especially with the six cylinder engine. Before long, I was running trucks to get serviced or making deliveries to customers. Best of all, I was enjoying doing truck things.
Then one day I had to drive the Ford one-ton. It was an older flatbed with a tandem axel. I don’t remember exactly what year it was, but it looked almost identical to the red ’77 F-350 in these pictures on Deadclutch. Used to deliver pallets of sod, it spent most of the time sitting in back under a streetlight. One of the inside tires was flat, and you guessed it, the foreman told me to get it fixed.
There are moments you look back on later, knowing the experience changed you. The on-ton was an intimidating beast. Half again the size of the F-150 I was used to. It had a normal sized truck cab but an eight foot wide flatbed. It was high off the ground, somewhere between a regular truck and a semi. And when I started it, it sounded like I pissed off King Kong.
Five minutes is all it took to fall in love. I learned to start off in second, using the granny-gear when the truck was loaded. Then to double-clutch so I didn’t grind gears. It had a 460 cubic inch V-8 that bellowed. The sound coming from behind the cab where the tailpipe was. Every time I shifted, it grabbed a lungful of air for the next roar. It drove like an angry, drunken bull. The clutch grabbed early. Changing gears was like playing hide and seek. The loose manual steering took half a turn to answer the helm. And it was magnificent. Driving it was an accomplishment, like I graduated something.
No on delivered more pallets to job sites than me that summer. I tried to turn every errand into an excuse to drive the one-ton. Every time I drove it, I felt like I was doing important work. As a 16 year old kid, I had recently discovered the joy of driving. But that summer, I discovered the freedom that comes from driving a truck.
Photos: Ford and Deadclutch
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