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 |   Tales from real life |
| Well, if they're not true, they oughta be! |
A friend and I were lamenting the decline and fall of Sears Roebuck today. We agreed that they were once a mainstay of the middle-class lifestyle. I suggested that they were the Amazon of the 20th century. My wife and I shopped regularly at the big Sears store in the Overlake Shopping Center. And you might not find an unusual item in-stock, but you could order almost anything from their catalog and get it in a week or two. It's a shame that their management couldn't understand and adapt to internet shopping. They already had the warehouses, a huge catalog, and a good reputation for service. My friend wistfully recalled the Craftsman brand hand tools and their iron-clad guarantee. And that reminded me of a story. When I was in high school, my dad bought a 1950 Ford F5 truck with a dump bed. The well-maintained vehicle was an impulse buy from an estate sale and Dad named it Homer. It was over 20 years old and we didn't need it, but the 1.5-ton capacity came in handy sometimes on our small ranch. Homer had a flathead V8 that made only 100 HP, but the transmission had a compound low gear that would allow us to pull stumps if we could get enough traction. A friend of a friend talked my dad into using it to move a small house early one Sunday morning. We didn't have permits or flashing lights, just a pace car with a red rag on a stick waving out the side window. The 500 square-foot building had been jacked up and put on axles the previous day so that we could start at first light. I rode in the cab with Dad, and it took about three hours to make the 15-mile trip over gravel roads. A few early risers were justifiably annoyed, but the house arrived safely at its new location, and we were home in time for lunch. Homer didn't get a lot of road miles, so tires tended to age out rather than wear out. Either way, a flat is a flat. And the big dual rear wheels had split rims that made tire changing dangerous. My dad had experience as an auto mechanic, so he knew better than to try to work on a split rim with hand tools. Instead, we would take the wheel off and have a garage change the flat tire for us. Some of Homer's wheels hadn't ever been removed and the giant lug nuts were rusted solidly in place. One afternoon, Dad had a 3/4-inch drive flex handle attached to a 2-inch socket and couldn't get enough leverage to break the nut loose. He grabbed a 3-foot length of steel pipe from the junk pile and slid it onto the end of the flex handle. But even with a 'cheater', the lug nut wouldn't budge. In the end, Dad was hanging off the sidewall of the dump bed, swearing and bouncing his full weight up and down on the 'cheater'. Oddly enough, the flex handle broke off at the pivot point behind the socket. That derailed our plan to get the flat tire fixed, so we had to go to town to look for a new flex handle. But remember what I said earlier about the Craftsman guarantee? Dad took that broken tool into our local Sears store and showed it to the clerk. The guy didn't bat an eye, he just handed Dad a brand-new flex handle. On the way home, Dad laughed and told me that he'd actually bought the 3/4-inch socket set at a second-hand store. Sears replaced the broken tool with a new one and didn't even ask to see a receipt. Now that was service! p.s. Dad could be very resourceful when brute strength failed. He used a propane torch to get that lug nut smoking hot. And once it had expanded a bit, it popped loose easily. |
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