Earlier this week I received a surprise news tip and ended up spending a bit of my afternoon at Woodlawn Regional Park admiring some classic vehicles.
When I say classic, I mean these machines are approaching their centenarian birthdays, but you wouldn’t have known it by looking at them, outside their style of course.
Before going to the park I was helping put stories on the Mercury website, while also trying to think of ideas for this very column (and dreading it), when I got a phone call from a Mr. Kelly Tytlandsuik.
Our fearless leader David Willberg was out of the office, doing some journalism I suspect, so Kelly’s call was transferred to me, and thankfully so because I needed to get my mind off of this piece you’re now reading — I heard somewhere distractions help with writer’s block . . .
Kelly said there were a couple fellas down at Woodlawn with two Model T pickup trucks, camping out on their way to Alaska.
It sounded like a neat story, but I wanted to run it the boss first to make sure I wasn’t wasting time, as I’m never quite sure what constitutes a good story in someone else’s mind.
Err on the side of caution if you will.
At length David returned and as I suspected he thought it would make for great content to put in today’s edition of Â鶹ÊÓƵeast Lifestyles.
I called Kelly back, told him we were very much interested in the Model Ts and within minutes, I swear like three minutes, he was at the office to pick me up for a cruise to the park.
The truck he picked me up in is also definitely worth a mention.
Now I’m not a car guy by any stretch. Sometimes I see a vehicle and think, ‘Wow, that one’s pretty cool,’ but when it comes to makes and models, everything’s Greek to me.
I do love the look of older vehicles though, because it seems every decade you go back, the more gangster the styles get — and I mean real gangster, like Lucky Luciano, not Freeway Ricky Ross — but again, to name most vehicles just by looking I have to check the hood ornaments.
So when I saw Kelly’s green 1951 GMC half-ton, part of me wondered if he’d borrowed one of the Model Ts he was talking about just to come bring me back to the park.
This is ridiculous of course, but I got to ride in a cool old school truck to go look at some cool old school trucks.
Anyway, when we got to the park I met two interesting gentlemen, the Preacher and the Prof, who you can read more about in my story Classic trucks make for classic trip.
Their real names are Brian McNamara and Lee Kilmer and the pair decided to drive their restored Model T pickups from their home state of Iowa to Alaska.
These Model Ts were impressive to me, I know because I looked at them and thought, ‘Wow, those ones are pretty cool,’ and when I say they looked gangster; I’m talking prohibition bootleg gangster.
The trucks, one from 1926 and the other ’27, had the hand cranks at the front, wooden floorboards, wire spokes and the exteriors were clean and shiny, making for a pair of sharp automobiles.
I wanted to slap on a fedora, grab a Tommy Gun, fire up the engine and head for the nearest bank.
This of course would be impractical as the Preacher noted they were averaging about 35 mph, and though I’m not a car guy, I think the Estevan Police Service’s Dodge Challenger can go a little faster, but you get the idea.
The point is it was a cool experience to go see these super vintage trucks and I like the idea that enthusiasts out there are restoring them to their former glory.
Sure they aren’t all that roomy, and as mentioned, they’re not that fast on the highway, but they look great and there’s a sentimental value that even a person like me, who’s pretty much automobile illiterate, can appreciate.
