Hey Buddy, How About a Tow?...

My brother, Thomas,(Buddy) was always a very gutsy fellow who was game for about anything.

I recall one time in Colorado I was driving my truck back to Pueblo where I lived at the time from somewhere in Texas where I had delivered a load of pipe to an oil rig, when my truck ran out of fuel.

It was one of the JH Marks trucks that had an in-line six cylinder butane burning engine. The truck was empty and I had loaded the pole trailer piggy-back onto the tractor like log trucks do. The entire rig weighed about 10 thousand pounds.

As it happened, I ran out of fuel near a small grocery store about ten or so miles from town. Luckily, there was a pay phone in front of the store. It was very early in the morning and still dark, and I didn’t want to wake my wife to come after me because our baby would be asleep so I called my brother, Buddy. He had a 1953 Oldsmobile 98 and I asked him to come out and take me home. Knowing my brother, I should have known he would have something more on his mind than just taking me home.

When he got there, he backed his car up to my truck and drug a chain out of the trunk. He fastened one end of the chain to the front of the truck and the other to the back bumper bracket of his car and told me to get in the truck. He asked me if the trucks' air tanks had air left in them and I told him they did.
He said he’d pull my truck in to the truck yard and to not use the brakes unless I absolutely had to. I wasn’t crazy about the idea and I tried to talk him out of it but to no avail so I did as I was told. He got into his car and started to very gently pull the truck.

It was a crazy idea but it worked. I only used the brakes a couple of times, going down small hills and going around curves to get into the yard, and Bud didn’t go over about 15 or 20 miles an hour.
Being very early in the morning, there was almost no traffic, only a few cars, and before long, we pulled into the truck yard.

He stopped me in front of the butane storage tank and we unhooked my truck from his car. Then I fueled the truck and cranked it to make sure it would start and parked it next to the fence in its' parking place.

It was Sunday morning and now getting daylight and we didn't have to work that day so we went to the truck stop and I bought us breakfast. We each had a stack of hot cakes and an order of ham and eggs, over easy, and a pot of coffee. We ate and drank coffee and had a good laugh about the whole thing. Then he took me home. It was quite an experience.

That was only one of many wonderful experiences my brother and I had together.

Later...