The Ford Econoline

One day I remember Dad drove home in an old beat up Ford Econoline van. It was bright yellow and had "AGT" printed on the sides. It had been used by AGT (Alberta Government Telephone) as a maintenance van. I thought it was the most beautiful vehicle I’d ever seen. I still wasn’t old enough to drive but I couldn’t wait. Of course by the time I could drive, Lester and I were the only kids left home so the van pretty much became mine.

Dad painted the van a dark blue and it was truly a cargo van. It had two bucket seats in the front and the back was totally barren. It had three-on-tree and windows in the back but no side windows. I don’t know the year for sure but it was either from the early 60’s and it was built tough. This was from the days when they meant “Ford Tough”. As an example, I remember one day Dad and I were driving to Waterton in the van and Dad must have dozed off. We started drifting into the oncoming lane of traffic and there was a car coming. I yelled at Dad and he corrected enough that we avoided a head on collision but he did side swipe the other car. He literally caved in the side of that car but I looked at our van and all he had done was scratched the paint. I kid you not; all he did was scratch the paint. The motor on that old van was a straight six and it was ridiculously simple to work on. Lester and I did everything on it ourselves. Since the motor was inside the van all you had to do was remove the cover with a couple of clips and the entire motor was right there in front of you. One time we lost the keys so we simply jumpered the starter coil and started it that way. We did quite a bit of work on the van but we loved it.

I think the best feature of the van was the window washers. It had a little foot activated pump and the jets where the water squirted out were actually little screws. If you turned the screw with a wrench then you could aim the water jet where you wanted it. Of course we figured it would be much more useful to aim the water jets out the side rather than at the window. Lester and I would drive around Waterton and as we passed pedestrians on the sidewalk we would press on the pump and nail them in the side of the head. It was hilarious and we thought we were soooo funny. One day we were driving down the back alley above the road on the west side of town and we nailed a guy in the side of his head and as we were laughing a rock came flying out from under the van. It took a moment for my brain to catch up to my eyes but I soon realized that the guy we had just squirted was throwing rocks at us. The rock was a huge one too, the size of a softball. Luckily he had thrown a big rock because he wasn’t able to throw it far enough to hit us but it did roll underneath of us. We booted it out of there as fast as we could and we thanked our lucky stars that we were heading the direction we were. That was a dead end street and if we had been going the other way we would have had to turn around and pass that guy again.

Another time we were driving the van between Cardston and Waterton when out of nowhere this humongous seagull flew right into the front of the van. It hit so hard that it made a big dent in the front of the van right on the O and R of FORD. That dent stayed there as long as we had the van.

This is also the van we used to collect our beer bottles in after the long weekends and I shared that story on Lester’s birthday. Just to bring it into my autobiography, I’ll repeat the story here. We would take the old Ford Econoline out on the Monday morning and gather up the empty beer bottles that were laying all over town. We would fill the entire van with hundreds of cases of empty beer bottles. We eventually got tired of picking up the loose bottles laying on the ground and started collecting the empties people had stacked in neat cases outside their trailers and tents. One time we were in an area of the campground where the only way out was over the bridge. Someone got mad at us and tried to chase us down. He was on foot and we were in the van so of course he couldn't catch us but then he then stood in the middle of the bridge (our only way out) and we were lined up at the far end of the campground. It was a straight road from our van to where the man was so we played a game of chicken. We sped down the road right at the man on the bridge. Obviously he jumped out of the way but if he hadn't we would of killed him. How dumb, but what fun memories. The cops finally tracked us down when we were out in the middle of the Dardanelles and when he saw who we were he called in on his radio. "It's just a couple of locals out making some bucks collecting empty bottles." He did point out that it was against the law to have a blanket hanging out of the back of the van covering our license plate. Ooops!?! Apparently the guy who we nearly ran over reported that we were stealing things from the campground. He didn't know what we had stolen though. Thank goodness no one accused us of stealing empty beer bottles because we were guilty of that.

I loved that van and I really hated to turn it over to Lester when I went off to BYU. A while back Lester sent me some pictures of our vans twin brother and I’ve looked all over for those pictures but I can’t find them. I grabbed a picture off the Internet that is pretty much the same van that we had. I’d love to have that van now.