062
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062
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Transcription
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The roads we had to travel were roads made by horse drawn wagons and carriages. Ruts were often 8 to 10 inches deep, this meant that the clearance on the car had to be as much as the horse drawn equipment. It was not uncommon to hit a high center and have to use a shovel to dig out the center or fill in the ruts.
There was very little on the car that could not be fixed by a good blacksmith. In fact the first auto mechanic we had in Crawford, was a young man who worked as a blacksmith and later changed his sign to a mechanic. I have repaired many parts of the Model T. The bearings in the motor could be made by hand. The gears in the differential could be repaired by any one that could handle a wrench. It was possible to get the gears in backward, which I have done, and when I expected to go forward I went backward instead.
It was a problem for my father to drive. When he first started driving and had an emergency he would yell "WHOA" expecting to stop. I learned to drive at the age of 10, and he would often let me drive. No license was required for either the car or the driver in the early 1900's. I never had a drivers licence [sic] until after Verna and I were married. We bought our first car in 1929. It was a 1922 coupe, for which we paid $25.00, and drove from Lincoln to Crawford, a distance of 475 miles, with a cost of $8.75 for gasoline. The only problems we had were flat tires and a broken fan belt. There were no paved roads, a few miles of gravel, but mostly just dirt roads.
I have no idea how any tires I have had to patch. If we went 500 miles with out a flat we were lucky. We patched them at the side of the road and pumped them up with a hand pump. In 1926 I drove from Crawford to Cumro, Nebraska where Verna was spending the summer on the ranch with her folks. I left Crawford at 3:00 a.m. and arrived at 9:30 p.m., a distance of 350 miles. I had to go thru the sand hills, open 11 gates, and back up some of the hills when I was low on gas, in order to get gas to the motor.
I made this same trip in 1972. The road was paved and is Nebr. HY No 2. It took me only 8 hours to make the trip. Just one half the time it took me in 1926. The hills appear to be smaller, there were no gates to open, no cattle guards to cross. I did't [sic] have to patch any tires.
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Metzger Memories
