On a warm Saturday last spring, I made my rounds to several local yard sales. At one of the stops I found some tools to add to my collection.

Encouraged by my last foray, the next Saturday, I ventured out to more of what this time turned out to be disappointing yard sales. Motoring away from each one, I said aloud, “What has happened here? Last week I found great stuff. At every one of these yard sales, I only see clothes, baby things, dishes, furniture. Where is all the good stuff? Where are all the tools?”

Finally, I pulled up in front of what would turn out to be my last yard sale of the day. Walking up toward the house there stood before me a long table littered with the usual clothes, dishes, and baby things. Nowhere in sight did I spy any guy stuff.

I stood disappointed, staring at the cluttered table surrounded by enthusiastic bargain shoppers. Discouragement led my gaze to look behind the shoppers, following the line of the house to the garage at the left end. Immediately left of the garage, poking its tail out from under the remains of a ratty old tarp was a dark green tailgate with the word CHEVROLET in raised white letters. “Now we’re talking,” I said aloud as I maneuvered enthusiastically for closer inspection.

At that moment, the wife was busy with buyers, while her husband seemed drawn in three or four directions at once by still other shoppers. While awaiting his return, my thoughts alternated between how I might approach him on the subject of his antique truck and anticipating his fury at my showing potentially unwelcome interest in what I assumed was his pride and joy.

Less than a minute later, as he marched back up the drive sort of toward me, I called out to him. Pointing over my shoulder to the truck, I said, “Nice yard sale, but what about that.”

Fully expecting him to immediately order me off his property for violating the unspoken, but well-understood, intimate man/antique-truck relationship, instead I was met with, “Well, as a matter of fact…”

He led me straight to the old truck. As he rounded the corner of her bed, he grabbed hold of a corner of the tatty old tarp while I grasped the opposite corner. We lifted the dusty, threadbare old thing, pulling it along the bed, up and over the cab, then down across the hood to the ground, revealing an intact 1952 Chevrolet 3100 1/2-ton pickup truck.

I have always been a Dodge man, having owned many in my life. However, they have always been the more modern models of sedan or station wagon. Still, I felt my life incomplete. I am a man who willingly will go on public record here admitting to suffering from several addictions, not the least of which is an incurable attraction to classic American pickup trucks. There is an aspect of them that touches something deep within me, perhaps the long lost symbol of hard-working America.

The 1946-47 Dodges, the 1947-1953 Chevrolets, and the 1960-69 Ford pickups pretty much encapsulate my favorites. By the time I become old, whenever someone informs me that I have achieved that condition, I hope to own one of each.

This owner and his wife had raised their kids in that house. The truck was purchased years ago as a father and son project. Not being particularly handy, the family owned and drove this truck during their tenure with varying degrees of success. Their kids now grown and gone, the parents had plans to move across the country to the Pacific Northwest. Worried that no one might want the truck, what to do with the old girl plagued them.

So when this Chevy pickup dropped into my lap less than a mile from my house as the crow flies, I just had to have her. Yard sale? What yard sale. My world at that moment was this ’52 Chevy in all her Forester Green glory. The owners’ prayers apparently also finally answered, an actual buyer suddenly dropped into their collective lap, the husband was more than happy to go over her with me in detail, answering my every question.

It turns out that a hurricane years ago had brought a neighbor’s pine tree down across the fence and onto the cab of this truck, crushing the top. Okay, that’s going to take some engineering to fix that, I thought. Ideas flashed through my mind as I engineered a solution. I tend to see the potential in projects like these; I see the dent fixed. So we moved to the next item.

By the time I left his house, my mind was brimming with ideas and information, reality and the usual fantasy, as well as the shock of what seemed my own prayers answered. Joe and I had exchanged telephone numbers. About two hours later my phone rang. It was Joe, friendly and ready to talk turkey. Five hundred dollars American would seal the deal, he said, truck, footlocker, and several boxes full of spare parts.