The only truck I've ever had for daily driving was a white Dodge three-on-the-floor pickup, a 1966 I think, the kind with just two doors and one bench seat. This was the Neosho (Missouri) Daily News delivery truck that the publisher (Howard Bush) let me drive in the morning and until about 3 p.m. to go cover stories, to get back so the delivery crew could get the papers in distribution. This was a summer internship for me, as a reporter and photographer.
Jezz, I loved driving that. It was nearly new at the time, and it was the right vehicle for that mostly rural area. The delivery crew landed it in a ditch while I was there, but the metal came out unscathed. I also got to drive it to cover the Saturday night dirt track stock car races, which was great fun.
That was some truck. A pick-up by the old definition. I lived in a tourist cabin for the summer not far from the newspaper office which was in an old chicken hatchery.
This was an adventure for a young person who had grown up in the Chicago suburbs. On my 21st birthday, i covered a murder at the crime scene. Then back to journalism school in Columbia, Mo., where I'd met the woman I married after being a widower for ten years in my sixties.