A Tale of Two Cars

 I got my first car in 1957.  It was a 1930 Ford Model A 1/4 ton pickup.

I got to drive it home from North Shepherd in Houston to our barn in Liverpool, Texas.  Then my dad and I took it apart and laid all the parts out in the barn.  "Put it together and make it run," he said, "and you've got yourself a car."

I owned five Model A's and one Model B over the next few years - most of them rescued from fields and barns.  I kept the best parts and cleaned them up enough to sell. The proceeds helped keep me in gas money.

My Dad's first car was a Model T Ford.

He and his brother built the whole thing from parts they scrounged from the Camp Logan dump, just down the road from where they grew up on Washington Avenue.

He had quite a few stories about that old jalopy, but probably the most impressive was this one:

They had driven the thing to Crockett to visit relatives and about the time they got there it started knocking.  They knew they were about to throw a rod. They did not have extra rod bearings, and no money to buy any, so they replaced the worn out bearing with a piece of pork rind and made the 120 mile trip back home.