For those of you in the towing industry, do you remember your first experience driving a tow truck?  I do.  I was 15, and I was with my brother-in-law, one of two drivers (the other was my older brother Mike) at McMinnville Towing, the company my parents owned.  We were at the parts store, and he said, "You drive back to the lot."  It was an old Ford 1-ton 4-speed, and it wasn't just the first time driving a tow truck, it was the first time driving a stick shift.  It wasn't pretty.  After backing out of the space, I was having a hard time going forward without killing the engine.  The tow sling was edging farther out into the street every time I rolled slightly backward and tried to depress the  accelerator pedal in conjunction with releasing the clutch.  I have to hand it to my brother-in-law, though.  He calmly turned on the rotator lights so no one would run into us, and he had me keep trying till I got it.

One of the benefits of being in a tow truck and not a car.

The first vehicle I owned was a 1949 Willys Jeep with a Chevy 283 in it, painted camo.  My 8-year-old just the other day asked me what happened to it, because I've told him about it a few times.  "I traded it for a '69 LeMans," I told him.

"What's that."

"A car with a nose longer than the Honda I'm driving now."

"You shoulda kept the jeep," he said.

Duh.  Like I don't know that now.  I crashed the LeMans into a tree a year after I got it.  The Willys couldn't go 95 mph, so I doubt it would have met the same end.

My parents sold the tow company before I was old enough to drive legally for them, so my first real driving experience was when I was 20, for a company named Estby Towing in Beaverton, Oregon, where my brother-in-law was now managing.  His brother Leonard was my trainer. Leonard and I had known each other for years, so learning from him was easy.  I was assigned to a Chevy 1-ton with a 454 and a Vulcan Cradle Snatcher.  Wow, what fun! Like dollying a car every time you hook up.  And try keeping those extension chains
away from the side of a Suburban.  We would tie shop rags around the clevis hook at the top of the extension chain so that it was a scuff rather than a scratch.

Leonard did a good job of training me, I have to admit.  In the 20 years I was behind the wheel  accidents and damage claims were few and far between, and it's my experience that getting off to a good start is crucial.  And we had fun.  One day we stopped for lunch at Burger King, and we ate in the truck.  There were no cupholders, so while eating I was in the habit of resting a drink on the bottom of the steering wheel so that it leaned against the horn button.  I had parked with the wheels turned slightly, so this time I had to give the steering wheel a laborious partial-turn to lock it into place before my “cupholder” was in place.  We ate our food and shot the breeze, and when it came time to leave, I forgot that I had given the steering wheel the turn to lock it, so when I turned the key over, the steering wheel sprung back to its resting position, launching the three-quarters full cup of soda into a 540-degree spin before it landed upside-down on my lap.  I can still hear the sound of Leonard laughing.

Have a safe and profitable week.

Sincerely,
Nick Kemper
www.TowPartsNow.com

My daughter is learning to drive, and she’s doing fine with it, but it makes me remember some of MY escapades at that age.  Yikes!  It also reminds me of some accidents I covered, unfortunately. 

On one late evening, I was dispatched to W. Burnside Rd. in Portland, near the Washington Park Zoo, to recover an older Honda that was on its top about 50 yards off the road.  This was a wooded area, and the road went up a steep incline, but it was highly-traveled and narrow, so there were a lot of accidents on this road.  When I got to the scene, I tried to find where the vehicle went off the road, because it's often easiest to bring a car up the way it went down, but I couldn't, so I found the simplest route back to road, rolled the vehicle over, and pulled it up.

The next day, the vehicle's driver, 18 years old, and his mother arrived at the storage lot to view the vehicle and get some personal items.  He was pretty banged up, but okay, and I learned that there had been 5 teenagers in this little late 70s Civic, and that they were all okay, which was pretty amazing considering that there wasn’t a single piece of glass left in this car.  They couldn’t find his wallet.  I told them I would revisit the accident scene later that day and take a look for it, and give them a call if I found it.

That afternoon, I drove up to the scene and started looking for the wallet.  I couldn't find it, and I couldn't help noticing that there wasn't very much glass in the foliage and on the ground where the vehicle had lain on its top.  Also, I still couldn't see where the car had come off the road, which was strange.  As I looked around, I noticed some glass on a marked trail on the hillside above me, opposite the road, about 25 yards up the hill.  I hiked up to the spot, and sure enough, there was a pile of glass on the trail.  It was a wide trail, part of the Forest Park trail system, and I thought maybe they had been messing around, trying to drive this little car on the trail, and rolled off and down hill, but that didn't explain how the glass had gotten on the trail . Then I looked farther up the hill, and I saw the trail of crushed ferns and damaged brush.  I followed it uphill, passing a homeless person's tent about 5 feet from where the vehicle went, up about 500 yards, before I came to one of the Forest Park Roads.  There I found a long set of skid marks leading to the road corner.  I turned and looked down the hill to see how far this little car had flown into the air and rolled over-and-over down this steep, wooded incline, until it came to rest at the bottom of the gulch alongside the much busier Burnside Rd.

5 teenagers, and they all walked away.  I never found the wallet.

Have a safe and profitable week.

Sincerely,
Nick Kemper
www.TowPartsNow.com