It goes without saying Americans love their pickup trucks. Being a true and tried southern redneck kind of guy, I had rather have a truck instead of a car. Why, just look at the things you can do with a truck that you can’t do with a car.
My first truck was a 1953 Ford F-100. Won’t long after I got married, I thought I needed a new truck — which happened to be a 1976 Ford. This truck did not meet my needs and so I traded it for a 4×4 Ford pickup.
Time went by and I bought a 1976 GMC pickup with four-wheel drive from a friend. This was a great truck but it only got 11 miles per gallon of gas. With gas prices on the rise, I also bought a second truck. It happened to be a 1976 Chevy LUV, a more fuel-efficient truck which I could drive to work and trade dogs out of. The little truck’s paint job was a faded out green, but it ran good and got 35 miles per gallon of gas.
If’en you were born after the 1980s, you probably don’t know what a Chevy LUV was. A little history lesson on these small trucks might be needed. You see back in the early ’70s, the big three automakers in the U.S. got caught with their britches down. Yes-sir-re, the Japanese cornered the U.S. Market with small pickups and cars. Gas was supposedly in short supply and gas rationing was happening more often, thus raising the price.
GM at the time was the world’s largest corporation and a dominant force in the American car and truck market. They didn’t think these smaller companies like Toyota, Mazda and Isuzu (all from Japan) could make such an impact on the American Market.
With gas prices still going up and the sale of these small foreign pickups going up, GM knew that they had to act fast.
GM reacted by using its partial ownership of Isuzu Motors LTD in Japan to supply their needs for small gas-saver trucks. Why, they simply bought the trucks from Isuzu and slapped some Chevrolet emblems on the side of them and called their new mini-truck LUV for “Light Utility Vehicle.”
In fact, the Ford people did the same thing by launching a Mazda pickup it renamed as the Ford Courier.
As for myself, it didn’t matter if I owned a foreign pickup because I loved my little green truck and it got 35 miles per gallon of gas — plus it had a whopping 80 H.P. engine. This was a perfect truck for two people to ride to work in or just ride the countryside looking for deals.
Weighing less and having less power can be an advantage over bigger trucks when going through mud. That’s exactly how my little truck got dubbed with the name “The Green Lizard.”
Seems there was a bunch of us guys dove hunting in a large field on the outskirts of Roland. Why, I bet that field was a half-mile long and there weren’t enough of us to keep the doves from just landing in the opposite end of the field. The field had been planted in corn but it had been cut and won’t nothing left but shelled corn lying in that grayish, black, wet dirt that is often found in the lowlands. The only way to get to the other end of the field was to follow a muddy dirt road around the edge of the field.
After a little shooting, the doves got smart and would fly high above our heads and land on the opposite end of the cornfield. The fellers got tired of the slow action, but didn’t care about walking through the mud to the back side of the long field. Several of the guys that had the full size 4×4 trucks said there won’t no way they were driving their trucks in all that mud — why, it would take a tank to get through those muddy ruts.
Well, one thing led to another, and if’en you know me, you know I’ll take a chance on anything once. I said, “How much you wanna bet I can drive my little truck all the way to the end of the field and back again without getting stuck?” One of the guys who owned one of those big four-wheel drive trucks said: “I’ll bet you 25 dollars you can’t do it.” Then another chimed in, “I’ll double that bet” and then another said the same thing. Before I could say anything, those guys were laying their money on the hood of my truck.
What was I going to do? I just couldn’t back down now. I did,however, have a couple of aces in the hole in that I just knew my little truck wouldn’t let me down — and what the heck, if’en I got stuck, I knew the farmer who owned the land would pull me out with one of his many tractors.
I stuck their money in my pocket, revved the LUV’s engine up like it was a race car and took off. I fell in one mud hole after another and when the little truck acted like it might be sinking in the mud, I caught another gear. Why, before I reached the other end of the long field, I thought my eyeballs would bounce out of my head.
As I got to the end of the field, I turned the trucks steering wheel hard and showered down on the gas and spun her around. There I sat, only a half-mile from the finish line and victory for me and my little truck. I revved that 80 H.P. engine up several times — you know, like a bull getting ready to charge — and then away I went, headed to the other end of the field. Why, I bet I was throwing mud six foot high and the little truck was giving it all it had. All of a sudden on the last big mud hole I lost my grip on the steering wheel and was headed toward a deep drainage ditch. But you know the Good Lord looks after fools and mules. I grabbed the steering wheel and let off the gas just before going into the ditch. I threw the little truck in reverse, but she wouldn’t do nothing but spin.
What was I going to do? So close to the finish and the truck’s back tires would only spin. I could see the smiling faces of the guys who had bet against my little truck. I tried rocking the truck forward, but because of the ditch I couldn’t go far. Finally, with a little praying and some quick clutch and gear work, I could feel the truck ever so slowly crawling backwards. Those smiling faces began to form a frown as I pulled the truck into first gear and crossed the finish line throwing mud everywhere.
I just couldn’t stop without doing a victory spin. As I stopped, one of the losers said, “I be John Brown, I didn’t think that little Green Lizard of yours would make it.”
And that folks is how my little Chevy LUV became known as “The Green Lizard.”
J.A. Bolton is a member of the N.C. Storytelling Guild, Member of the Anson County Writer’s Club, Anson and Richmond county historical societies and author of the newly released book “Just Passing Time.”