INSIDE THIS EDITION:
- ADVENTURES IN TRUCK DRIVING by Karen Longeteig
- THE BAG BY THE DOOR by Catherine Cochran
- PROVIDENCE RIVER WALKING TOUR WITH LLC MEMBER CATHY HURST: THE RIVER AT THE HEART OF THE CITY
- KEY DATES FOR LLC's FALL SEMESTER
- AH SUMMER! by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Selected Poems
Click on the links to jump to the article.
Adventures in Truck Driving
by Karen Longteig
1.
When I was 13, my dad told me to come along with him to the field to begin my apprenticeship in harvest truck driving. I already knew how to drive the stick-shift Jeep, but the bigger trucks had to be mastered. We had a 1954 GMC, the “Jimmy”, and a very ancient Ford, maybe 1947, with three gears on the normal gear shift and a fourth gear stick underneath the driver’s seat, used if you could double-clutch it. That was employed mainly when you didn’t have a load of grain and could go fast, which my brothers loved to do. But they were assigned to drive the combines.
My job was to do the grain collecting from the combines only in the field, leaving someone older, at least 14 years of age with a driver’s license, to take the truck to town to dump the load at the grain elevator. I thought my field job was harder than just driving to town. The fields were hilly, and collecting the grain on a hillside was tricky. The machines were driven around the hills, not straight up and down, for power reasons. When the combine needed to unload its full bulkhead, the truck had to parallel the combine from above, and had to get up close and personal to the combine to catch the grain. Or when the truck had to drive on the lower side of the combine, it meant it had to be driven a little distance away so the flying grain stream ended up in the truck bed, not on the ground.
Why didn’t we just collect the grain easily while stopped, instead of doing this elaborate mating dance, you might ask? The answer is that the harvest season in Idaho at 3,700 feet elevation was rather short and sometimes brutal, sometimes interrupted by rain or cold weather. Rain would shut down the operation by making the grain too wet to store in the grain elevator — oddly enough, grain becomes combustible when wet. Therefore, stopping the combine for any reason other than the death of the driver was unacceptable.
In the mid-1950s, the machines were all much smaller than they are in 2025. Everything was small — the bulkheads (grain bins), and the augers, which pulled the grain out of the tanks, and the trucks too. The truck driver was obliged to drive alongside the combine, matching its plodding speed and positioning the truck bed to catch the grain. On my first day, I drove too close to the combine and put a big dent in the auger casing. My dad had to hammer it out before we could go on. The second day I did it again. His patience was tried. But then I managed to work out the logistics and continued to drive in every harvest for the next nine years. I even received my mailed Masters diploma sheepskin in the truck, when my mom thrust it through the window while I waited in line at the warehouse. That master’s was in linguistics, but I probably knew more about truck-driving.
This is the actual truck I drove! The two guys in front of a deceased truck are my brothers, Iver and Wilfrid Longeteig. They found the actual old truck I drove in a junkyard, decades after our dad replaced it. This picture was taken over 20 years ago.
2.
Was this free and abusive child labor, you may ask? Not on our ranch. My dad paid his children the going rate for the hours they worked, whatever he would have had to pay one of the itinerant laborers who followed the harvest from Texas to Canada over the summer and who hung around the bars and cafes in town looking for a job.
At the end of that first summer, I was eager to spend my paycheck. Not so fast. I was required to put the entire amount into my college savings account. My dad deducted the labor costs from his operating expenses on income tax, while simultaneously ensuring three college educations. This was legal. My brothers, as combine drivers, got much better wages than I did — it was harder work — and they essentially paid their way through most of their seven years of university and law school.
3.
At 14, I was a fully-licensed (in daytime) truck driver. Day One, I was given the Jimmy, which carried about 4 tons of grain. I started the drive to the grain elevator. There was a long and steepish hill to descend via a fairly straight paved highway. I started down, apprehensive and driving really slowly. Wait! The truck was going too far to the right side! I turned the wheel sharply to the left, what I later learned was “over-correcting.” The truck dived toward the left. Rinse and repeat. My truck was careening from side to side, even at a slow speed, on the two-lane road. I saw a car at the bottom of the hill, ready to drive up. Hitting it seemed inevitable. Fortunately, the other driver saw ME and had the sense to turn clear off the highway onto a side road until I passed by. The driver must have been a local. Somehow, I managed to gain control of the vehicle by over-correcting less, and, trembling from head to foot, made it to the warehouse. That night at supper I didn’t want to admit to what I thought of as my bad driving, but then realized that if the truck needed fixing, Dad needed to know about it, and I certainly didn’t want to drive the damn thing again the way it was. My father, Dad the mechanic, confessed that he had been working on the steering but hadn’t gotten it quite right and would see to it in the morning. I was vindicated. Dad was a clever and diligent mechanic, self-taught, as his father had used mostly horses to pull the machinery. But Dad liked inventing tools and machine parts, manufacturing them in his shop and fixing them himself.
4.
Often there were several combines, trucks, trap wagons (small mobile grease, gasoline, and tool trailers), and pickups in a field at once. When quitting time came in the evening, the rule was that at least one other person waited for the last person, and they left the field together. Vehicles sometimes didn’t start or got stuck in a draw, and walking home could be as much as 8 miles.
When I was sixteen, one late afternoon I was dropped off at a field to drive a spare truck back to the house. Everybody else skedaddled six miles toward a hot dinner. They broke the rule!
The truck started fine, but when I put it in gear and moved forward, it reared up off its front wheels about 18” and came down with a whump. What the heck?! I tried moving it in reverse, and it did the same thing. I got out and discovered that my dad had jerry-rigged a hinged triangular iron hitch to the front bumper so the truck could be towed, which was how it had appeared in the field. But there was no way to tie up the hitch so the truck wouldn’t run over it!
Evening was falling. I looked around anxiously for something to use to tie the hitch up. There was not a piece of twine, nor rope, nor baling wire, not a rag or even a scrap of an old coyote skin to be found. I took inventory of my clothes. No belt, no bandanna, no hatband, no jackknife to cut off one leg of my jeans. My socks were short. Sigh. So I took off my bra and used it to tie the dirty hitch good and tight to something else on the hood. I made it home for supper. My dad and my brothers were highly amused, and I mean inordinately amused, falling off their chairs laughing, at my mechanical solution, but Dad had the grace to apologize, first for giving me a bum vehicle, and second, for leaving me behind.
The Bag by the Door
by Catherine Cochran
The day in January when I stopped by my mother’s house it was snowing. I was in my twenties and had been away to college and come back. My mother was in the hospital for a stay that would become one of many, revealed over time. My task that day was to gather some things to take to her. I walked around the house and tried to think what someone would need for an unplanned hospital stay: a nightgown, glasses, a magazine, but that information was not yet packed in my carry on.
Photo by Wiser by the Mile on Unsplash
We moved frequently when I was a child, and my mother developed a fine-tuned system of boxing and labeling, packing and unpacking. The first move I remember, however, was unplanned. With only a Volkswagen Bug (Beetle) named Bonnie and no space for boxes, my mother had only moments to leave. In haste she grabbed her children, her courage, and her resourcefulness, along with what she would later label a “gypsy” spirit, and drove away.
The month before I stopped by my mother’s house, I had moved into my first apartment. It was a small studio which I had found through the classified section of The Providence Journal. There were two windows, one with a view of a back yard, and the other an alley way and a dumpster. I had only a few things to unpack when I arrived: a rollaway, an old desk, which doubled as a kitchen table, and a sense of newness, possibility, and arrival.
One night shortly after I moved in, there was a knock on the door. When I opened it, a man was standing there wearing a fur hat with integrated earmuffs and unlaced boots. He announced that it was snowing and told me to get my coat as we were going for a walk. I soon learned that his name was Richard, and he lived upstairs. A year of adventures and a lifetime friendship began with that walk in the snow and was stored away, along with the laughter, a jar of cookie cutters, and a certain stubbornness that was left to me by my mother.
In the fall of 2022 Richard was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and things began to move very quickly - surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, and a brief remission. Richard reached into his bag and moved through it all with strength and Grace.
Shortly after Thanksgiving almost 21/2 years from diagnosis, Richard called to say he was in the hospital, had a month to live, and would be moving to a new address. I could find no words and had nothing packed away to help.
A few weeks later as I entered his room to say goodbye, I wondered how he would pack for the journey and how I would find him.
The December night was crisp and star lit when I entered the hospital, but as I left and the doors opened onto the fluorescent lights of the parking lot, I could see that it was snowing. For a minute the glow of the lights seemed to become my mother’s house filled with the courage and faith of her final years, but as they merged, I could see the quiet of the falling snow reflected in the streetlights of a long ago winter walk. My bag felt heavy, and it was hard to keep it shut, but as the snow fell, I crossed the parking lot, and smiled.
Providence River Walking Tour with LLC Member Cathy Hurst:
The River at the Heart of the City
What role do rivers play in a city; why do communities develop along rivers? For millennia, rivers around the world have been places for people to travel, congregate, engage, and establish communities.
The Woonasquatucket and Moshassuck Rivers, which merge to form the Providence River, formed the heart of the original settlements in Providence. For hundreds of years, Native Americans, including the Narragansett and Pokanoket tribespeople, gathered near the confluence of the rivers for regular trading and social occasions. Plentiful seafood and game, and easy navigation from communities in present-day Southern New England, made this an attractive meeting spot. When Roger Williams and the white settlers arrived in 1636 it was an appealing location for them to build their first settlement.
The river has always been at the heart of Providence but it lost its way (literally and figuratively) in the twentieth century. Work over the past 40 years has restored the river to its rightful place.
The tour begins and ends near the east side of the beautiful 2019 Van Leesten Pedestrian Bridge near the corner of James and South Water Streets, across the street from Plant City. The route will take you along the riverfront on its eastern shore (the original seventeenth and eighteenth century settlement), across the river and through the market and customs area downtown, back along the west side of the river, and across the pedestrian bridge to the starting point.
So please join us as we walk in the footsteps of the original residents of the city, and learn about the role rivers have to play in the development and prosperity of a city. We’ll look at historic buildings and compare old photographs and paintings with the current appearance of the city. We’ll learn about the city’s inhabitants over the past 500 years. And we’ll explore how and why the river almost disappeared from view, and what’s been done to bring it back.
NOTE: Tours will run from June-November 2025.
Tours are currently scheduled through the end of August: June 21, July 4, July 12, July 26, August 9, August 23.
Fall tours will be scheduled later in the summer.
To book a tour, go to https://providenceonfoot.wordpress.com
This tour is not an activity connected to the Lifelong Learning Collaborative.
Key Dates for Fall
Monday, July 14: Look for our catalog announcement email
Monday, July 21: Registration opens at 9 AM
Week of September 8: Classes begin
Plus: Several members have asked for the future schedule so they can do some general planning. An approximate schedule is that future classes begin around January 5, March 16, June 15, and September 7.
Ah Summer!
“Then followed that beautiful season… Summer… Filled was the air with a dreamy and magical light; and the landscape lay as if new created in all the freshness of childhood.”
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Selected Poems
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash