Forever Cars, Part 7

Well, it looks as if no one else out there has a good car story, so I’ll just add one more anecdote and leave the door open in case anyone else wants to walk in with a car story sometime in the future.

Around 1977, we couldn’t manage anymore with just one vehicle, so I bought another. I didn’t have much money to spend and ended up with a 1969 GMC pickup truck (similar to the one in this photo). Its color was a sort of rust brown, which was great, because that made it difficult to see the real rust. It was as basic as a truck comes: V6, standard transmission (“three on the tree”) and no power steering.

One day, I was in West Alexander and needed to get to our newspaper’s office in Waynesburg. Rather than take the interstates, I decided to find a shortcut on the back roads through “the Finleys,” as the sparsely populated townships of East Finley and West Finley are called locally. Little did I know how steep and twisting those back roads could be. Driving across the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan would have been easier.

That night, my right arm began to ache and swell. By the time I climbed into bed, the pain was excruciating, and I had to sleep with it propped up on pillows. The next morning, I looked like Popeye the Sailor Man. I was sure it was broken.
My doctor and an intern following him around examined me. The intern said it must be broken. My doctor disagreed. “Tendonitis,” he proclaimed, preparing plaster for a cast. “What the hell were you doing?” he asked me.
“I was in a fight,” I said, “with my truck.”