"Pop" - Part 3
by Kenneth W. Neal
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| Fred, Fannie & Ken Neal with the 1939 Chevrolet - Sand Springs, OK (1946) |
Automobiles
Pop grew up with automobiles, unlike his own father who was a “mule man” and never comfortable with autos. Radford Neal was born in 1880 and so was 40 years old in 1920 when cars came along in earnest.
I know how bad it sounds (there’s a phrase right out of my dad’s mouth) to brag, but, as he would say, let me tell you a little story or rather several stories about pop and autos.
I know how bad it sounds (there’s a phrase right out of my dad’s mouth) to brag, but, as he would say, let me tell you a little story or rather several stories about pop and autos.
The earliest were of course told me by Pop.
He told me that when he was about 13, which would have been about 1927, that he jacked up a Model T and pulled the oil pan on the engine. Then he fired the T up, got back under it to look at the engine while it was running to see how the engine worked.
He knew enough to do this for only a minute because the engine was running without oil.
By this time he was the family chauffeur
It was about this time that a relative came to visit. I can’t remember whether it was an aunt or a grandma, but his father, busy in the fields as usual, sent pop into town to pick the woman up at the train station.
At first she refused to ride with pop because he was so little, but she relented.
My Uncle Virgil remembers that he and pop were in a Model T and the rest of the family in another vehicle in one of those nomadic moves from one farm to another.
They were fording a river, probably one of the Canadian rivers. Once started across, it would have been disastrous to have stopped, so pop was “flogging” the T. In the jouncing and bouncing, some mattress springs slid forward from the top of the load in the touring car.
“It was my job to hold up the springs,” Virgil told me some 75 years later.
He told me that when he was about 13, which would have been about 1927, that he jacked up a Model T and pulled the oil pan on the engine. Then he fired the T up, got back under it to look at the engine while it was running to see how the engine worked.
He knew enough to do this for only a minute because the engine was running without oil.
By this time he was the family chauffeur
It was about this time that a relative came to visit. I can’t remember whether it was an aunt or a grandma, but his father, busy in the fields as usual, sent pop into town to pick the woman up at the train station.
At first she refused to ride with pop because he was so little, but she relented.
My Uncle Virgil remembers that he and pop were in a Model T and the rest of the family in another vehicle in one of those nomadic moves from one farm to another.
They were fording a river, probably one of the Canadian rivers. Once started across, it would have been disastrous to have stopped, so pop was “flogging” the T. In the jouncing and bouncing, some mattress springs slid forward from the top of the load in the touring car.
“It was my job to hold up the springs,” Virgil told me some 75 years later.
