'Mello' Yellow - 1972 Chevrolet C10 Fleetside

Old pickup trucks that are still used as trucks, it seems, are a dime a dozen on the roads in the Southwest. From California's big coastal cities (and the farmland in between) to Phoenix to Albuquerque to Dallas, vintage pickups speak volumes about the rugged simplicity and honesty of days gone by. The more Detroit pumps out Cowboy Cadillacs, with their satellite-powered cup holders, solar running boards and electrically heated, digitally retractable tailgates, the more a back-to-basics plain old pickup truck appeals; they serve as reminders of a no-nonsense time when a handshake was as good as a promise, and when a truck was a tool instead of a fashion statement. Get behind a car driving slowly and your blood boils; get behind an old truck driving slowly, and somehow you're more likely to cut it some slack. After all, it's working, too.

It's the very definition of a 20-footer: The front 3/4 angle looks clean, but the plugged-up drainhole that saw the rocker absorb all of the air conditioning's moisture, the brightwork and especially the pickup bed bear the scars of a hardlived life. In retirement, they shall remain.

And so we come to this 1972 Chevrolet C10 half-ton short-bed. Admittedly, you see fewer Action Line Chevrolet pickups roaming around the roads of the Southwest--and if you do, they're probably long-bed 3/4-ton versions. That's because the light-duty short-bed models have become so popular that all of the good ones have been pulled off the road; they've either been restored to better-than-new, or else have been customized with fat tires, superchargers poking through the hood, neon color schemes, tweed interiors or any of the passing-fad hot-rod options people throw at old cars when they don't know what else to do with 'em. So even though a half-ton short-bed isn't quite the heaviest-duty beast in the fleet, seeing an authentic-looking Chevrolet pickup of the era in the wild, even if it's not perfect, is a treat in and of itself.

Buoyed by its promising appearance in a local classified ad, Scottsdale, Arizona's, David Ochser went to visit this truck. Nearest anyone can tell, this half-ton C10 had been a desert work truck all its life. David broke down the ownership history for us: "The original owner was a commercial and residential painter who purchased the truck new in Phoenix in July of 1972; he gave it to his son in March of 1992, and then that owner gave it to his son [who never titled it]. I bought it in October 2009; I'm the third titled owner, and the first outside the original owner's family."

And like many keepers of family heirlooms, the seller may not have understood just what it was that he had before he put it up for sale. The truck came with a mere smattering of options: Power steering and power brakes, for driveability; an AM radio, to keep tabs on the farm report; and, crucial for the months of 115-degree-plus heat in Phoenix and its surrounding desert areas, air conditioning. The Yellow and White exterior is the original factory-applied paint; the scars in the bed were accrued one at a time by ladders and paint cans and being a work vehicle for decades; and the surface rust that colors those owner-made scrapes and crevices is unlikely to go any further than it has.

Most folks would raise an eyebrow at a truck that's gone a documented 469,000 miles, but everything seemed pretty straightforward to David: It was as you see here, save for steel wheels and hubcaps on old tires, a non-operational three-on-the-tree shifter, and an A/C unit that had long been removed. Somewhere around the quarter-million-mile mark, back in the 1980s, the old Chevy 307 cu in V-8 was replaced with another Chevrolet engine; then it was finally parked, its use and service to the previous family completed, when some broken bracketry in the column-shift mechanism made it impossible to shift as it stood. Quickly, the family named it Mello, for reasons that Sixties-era singer-songwriter Donovan can probably clue you into if you don't get it.

Bringing Mello back from the dingy, sun-faded mess David dragged home to the relative jewel it is today took considerable elbow grease and not a small selection of cleaning products. "For the body, I used a hard polish with a wool bonnet, pressing down pretty hard with Mother's Wax products; I keep it up with Mothers Quick Detailer now." Four decades of grime shows up in the unlikeliest of places, so "once I removed the dash assembly, door panels, seats, etc., I used full-strength Simple Green as a cleaner and degreaser. I used it liberally at first, with a big soft brush to get in all of the cracks, followed by a 50/50 solution, and then just a towel and warm water." The lenses over the gauge faces were treated to a coat of Meguiar's Plastic Polish, and inside and out, the stainless and chrome filigree was treated to a coat of Flitz.

Yet there's a giant hole in the passenger's-side rocker panel (this, and its extraordinary mileage, are what qualified this machine for Driveable Dream status in our eyes). If rust visits a Southwestern car, it's because there's exposed metal for the seven-percent-humidity air to feed on, but it rarely goes any deeper than the surface; rust-through is unknown here, and the flapping salt-contaminated fenders of the Northeast and Midwest are but sad and sordid tales told by those who have traveled outside the Southwest.

Now, as a lightweight strengthening measure that had the benefit of being rustproof, the rocker panels on this era of Chevrolet pickup were filled with an expanding foam from the factory. Sounds like a good idea, right? Not so fast: The drainage holes were as prone to plugging up as they were in any other GM product of the time, if not more so, and so water had nowhere to go. But, what water, you ask? In the desert, bones blanch and their marrow evaporates. True; it's hot enough that, as we mentioned, air conditioning made the option list even on a workhorse vehicle. With nowhere to drain, the foam in the rockers absorbed the air conditioning unit's effluent, and slowly ate the passenger's-side rocker from the inside out, a festering blight that didn't stop until it saw sunlight.

Changes to the C10 have been few and far between. The nonfunctional manual transmission was replaced with a column-shifted Turbo 350 automatic; David swapped the factory steel wheels and hubcaps for a set of Chevrolet factory styled-steel wheels and modern radial tires for its few-yet-inevitable work trips; he sprang for a new radiator, and also added a rear "sport" bumper. The air conditioning refurbishment is on hold for the moment, as David decides whether to go with traditional R12-style equipment, or something a little more contemporary.

The truck's big-mileage days are over; David figures he drives it just a couple of hundred miles a year. Even so, it remains a work truck: This is the errand-runner in the Ochser family fleet, because running to the hardware store in any of David's Corvettes, second-generation Pontiac Trans Ams, Dukes of Hazzard General Lee Dodge Charger clone or wife Nancy's Cadillac CTS just won't cut it. So the C10 has to stay in peak operating condition.

The oil is changed annually with conventional 10W-40 Pennzoil, but "what has made a huge difference is one cup of Seafoam (an anti-moisture gas treatment) in the gas tank every other full tank. Even that second engine, which was installed in the 1980s, has 150,000 miles on it and smokes a little now... but after using the Seafoam religiously over a dozen or so tanks, she runs quiet and barely smokes anymore."

Despite its retirement, Mello has picked up a second, and no less important, job: Acting as a secure set of wheels for David's 15-year-old son, Gregory, as he practices his driving skills in advance of obtaining his driver's license toward the end of the year. "We have a couple of high-end cars that we do not want him learning on," David says, "and luckily, he loves driving Mello."

Time marches on and kids grow up to be of driving age, but something that isn't going to change anytime soon is that big jagged hole in the rocker panel. "I have replacement rockers for it," David admits. "And it's not a problem for me to put 'em in. But then I have to paint 'em. Then I'll have to paint the whole truck so everything matches, and get the bed straightened and fixed. And then I keep going and suddenly, my work truck isn't my work truck anymore, because it'll be too nice to haul anything in. I figure," Dave says, with a wave of his hand, "leave it alone. Plus," he adds, "this way, with that hole in the rocker panel, no one will come up to me and ask if it's for sale. It's not."