Keep on truck’n

It was exciting news in the old neighborhood where I grew up. Recently, a bona fide NFL All-Pro player, who graduated from Wisconsin, bought a farm not far away. He plans on retiring there, doing some farming and lots of hunting and fishing. The land is especially good for the latter two.

An acquaintance owns a Ford dealership and sold our new favorite NFLer (although not a Packer) a used pickup truck. It had quite a few miles on it, but it was in good shape. The new owner decided to have a bed liner sprayed on the inside of the box. He planned on using it as a work truck. He liked the look so much that he had the dealer spray the entire truck with bed liner.

It reminded me of my 25 years as a Packer season ticket holder. Often we would go to Green Bay early and wait outside the player parking lot to catch a glimpse of our favorites. It was interesting to see what vehicles the players drove. It broke down into two general groups – expensive, sometimes foreign and new cars/SUVs, and pickup trucks. The good ol’ boys drove the trucks – Brett Favre drove a beautiful new Ford pickup. One of our players was an alumnus of the University of Iowa – Aaron Kampman – and he drove an old farm truck. His vehicle was all about work, not flash. It was probably a farm truck in the off-season. That impressed me almost as much as his playing ability.

In my life and career, starting sometime under the age of 16, I’ve had (or driven) 10 different trucks. That is not counting my grandfather’s 1930 Ford Model A farm truck. It was, in fact, the first truck I drove. I was grossly underage, of course, and only drove it full of milk cans from the barn to the cooling spring tank after milking. Most farm kids were driving their dad’s truck by 14 or 15. It seems so impossible to think about a Model A as actually a working truck, but it was probably less than 30 years old when I drove it, and it likely had low mileage. He eventually upgraded it with a used 1948 Ford F-1

Eight of those 10 trucks were Fords, one was a Dodge and one was a Datsun. I inherited the Datsun when I was first hired as a superintendent, and it was gone in less than a year. My dad owned the Dodge for a while until he replaced it with a 1954 Ford F-1. Two of the Fords were mine, and the rest were owned by the club as part of our essential equipment inventory. Four of these vehicles had manual transmissions; the rest were automatics. Four of these trucks were six cylinders; the rest had eight lungs. We graduated from an AM radio only to the present day CD player along with AM/FM (but still no Sirius radio).

The golf course trucks were work vehicles, used to actually haul things or tow loads behind. The last two – my personal trucks – seldom ever did any work. In fact, my 2012 F-150 has never towed anything and never really hauled anything of consequence (other than me).

My favorite was probably the 1954 F-1. There are a lot of sentimental things about that truck. It was from the days of oversized V-8s and 100+ octane gas. The F-1 was a minimalist truck, like most of the 1950s. There was no automatic anything and the floor was rubber matting, no air conditioning and often no radio. The heater didn’t work well, and the windshield wipers were worse than that. It was light in the rear and rear-wheel drive required a couple of burlap bags of grain for weight in the winter. But I still loved that spartan truck.

It makes no sense for me, retired and at the age of 70, to be driving a truck, albeit a beautiful, comfortable one. The mileage isn’t very good, it is almost impossible to park in a ramp and the hood is so big that I’m really never sure where it is on the road. But every time I climb into it I am glad I have it to drive. Maybe it’s a matter of old habits dying hard or old habits are hard to break. It could simply be one of my life’s comfort zones. It clearly isn’t status. I would drive a Lincoln if that were the case.

I think it is a little bit of the personality of many, maybe most, golf course superintendents. Many times, unsure if I was at the right course or hotel for a superintendents’ meeting, I was reassured when I drove in and saw a lot or a ramp full of pickup trucks. Trucks, hats (most free), golf clubs and comfortable clothes are obvious parts of our identity. So are happy faces and endless talk about golf turf.

We have a good regional author in Wisconsin named Michael Perry. He is a hick from rural western Wisconsin, part-time farmer and full-time writer of things rural. He wrote a book titled “Truck.” It is not what I thought, but rather a love story centered on a guy who wants to rehab his old junky truck. Still, the title says a lot about what kind of people who see having a truck as an important component to a happy life. I guess you’d have to count me among them.