Truck: On Rebuilding a Worn-Out Pickup and Other Post-Technological Adventures

by John Jerome

“Know thy gadgets; first step in restoring some kind of wholeness to one’s life.” So observes John Jerome about his purpose for rebuilding a 1950 Dodge pickup. Yes, he needs the truck to haul manure, but Jerome also hopes that “by knowing every nut, lockwasher, and cotter pin I could have a machine that had some meaning to me.” Thus his year-long odyssey under the hood, among the brake shoes and valves, becomes more than a mechanic’s memoir; it is a meditation on machines, metaphysics, and the moral universe. Long after its publication in 1977, the essential dilemma of Truck still rings as Jerome dismantles the aged straight six, he also disassembles our reliance on “two-hundred-dollar appliances that sport flaws in thirty-five-cent parts” and decries the “deliberate encapsulation, impenetrability, of the overtechnologized things with which we furnish our lives.” Despite gouged knuckles, a frigid New Hampshire winter, frustrating and inexplicable assemblies, and a close call when the truck rolls off its jacks, he perseveres. In the end, he admits, “I did not find God out there in the barn among the cans of nuts and bolts.” What he does find, however, is that he must make peace with technology; it’s a mistake, he says, to “assume there is a point on that line between the caveman’s club and the moon shot that marks the moral turnaround, before which technology was somehow benign, after which it is malign.” While Jerome gains a truck that runs―sometimes―we gain new insight into a technology that continues to encroach upon our lives.

Genres: Nonfiction

155 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1977

Reviews

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one did help me along in my decision to buy an old Dodge truck and relocate back east.

[Gene Yagley III · Rating 5 out of 5]

Get it while you can!

Short version: this is a great book.

John decided he needs a truck for around his land to do home owning stuff. Instead of buying new though, he decides to take the challenge and buy a truck 20 years old. Buy it and rebuild it better than it was off the line. Create SuperTruck at a fraction of the price all the while being what would be considered "Green" or" Eco-Friendly" today.

There's more to the story, of course, but you should buy the book and find out for yourself.

Yes, there is a ungodly mistake of a picture of a red 1957 GMC on the cover of the reprint instead of the blue 1950 Dodge B Series Pilot House pickup that is the focus of the story and in the picture of the first print. Unfortunately, there is no fixing this as of now. The publishing company that made this mistake is out of business and the company distributing the book only has this edition left with no plans on republishing it after the supply is exhausted.

Do yourself a favor and get a copy while you can. I've bought it myself three times and have given two copies away as gifts.

[Chrisl · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of those library books I enjoyed and had positive results recommending. Review, as usual, copied from Kirkus.


KIRKUS REVIEW

Jerome, once an editor of Car and Driver, had settled into apple-cider and organic-gardening rusticity in New Hampshire when he decided to buy and rebuild an old pickup truck. To haul manure to the garden. And that, from early reconnaissance to disassembling, cleaning, and fixing, to the day when the 1950 Dodge, the Harry S. Truman, started to roll--that, folks, is the plot. In between come heroic ruminations on land ethics, the monstrous malfeasance of technology, the need to reclaim nuts-and-bolts basics. Not to mention some passing thoughts on competence as a signal of adulthood/manliness. In short, a goof on Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Leastwise, we hope it's a goof, because Jerome's extended monologue on the metaphysics of crankshafts, ignition systems, cylinders, valves, brakes, pistons, and steering-wheel alignment is a work of sheer, clever contrivance and only a liberal anointment of self-mockery saves the reader from terminal boredom. After 15 months he realized that the damn truck was just a truck. ""Not project, process or product, not gesture, philosophical statement, or symbolic act."" Just a truck. (Actually, you suspect he knew it all along.) The funny part is that it will be read by antique car freaks who wouldn't dream of using it to transport horse dung to the asparagus patch.
Pub Date: Feb. 23rd, 1976
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

[Will · Rating 2 out of 5]

I thought this book would be a nice companion to my own car restoration project.

The truck in the cover photo is a GM product so I was a little disappointed that it didn't match the subject of the book: a Dodge. Doesn't anyone ever check these things? However I was pleased to learn the Dodge was a 1950 model, very similar to one I own. Now I'm entertaining thoughts of restoring it too.

Mr. Jerome's story includes whole chapters on philosophy and descriptions of New Hampshire weather, as well as his struggles with his rebuild project. To be honest I skipped a lot of text that wasn't truck related. I enjoyed some of the technical descriptions of the truck's various systems. I felt badly for the author's sore hands and the freezing cold he endured.

In the end, there is no celebration, no scene of the author riding off into the sunset in his restored pickup. I was hoping the Mr Jerome's journey would end a little more satisfactorily, and as detailed in the last chapter, so did he. The truck project is completed... but is an old truck ever really finished?

I would very much like to know where this truck is today.

[David Ward · Rating 4 out of 5]

Truck: On Rebuilding a Worn-Out Pickup and Other Post-Technological Adventures by John Jerome (Houghton Mifflin 1977) (629.288) is a wonderful wonderful book that I read when I was a much younger man. In Truck, the author describes the process of building an old junked pickup truck back into running condition. He uses the experience as both an occasion and a tool for emotional and spiritual growth. The book is more about the insights gained than about the labor involved. This volume is what a very similar volume, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance aspired to be. My rating: 7.75/10, finished 1979.

[Colleen · Rating 3 out of 5]

The more things change...
Fine word craft and humor and though the text is nearly as old as I am, much of the ideas remain fresh. A fun and informative read.

[Tyler · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was worried there was going to be some philosophical bullshit and mostly there wasn't, instead it was just a very true account and I thoroughly liked the end.

That it was kind of shitty. Just so very true.

[Carol Peters · Rating 4 out of 5]

Today's inhale. Glad I wasn't the one rebuilding a 1950 Dodge pickup. In a barn in northern New England in the winter. Wonderful fun read.

[Justin Couchot · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fun quick read.

[Kelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Actually started this book over 20 years ago, when I gave it to my husband as a graduation gift. Now planning to finish it, if I can!
I did finish it. If I had been reading it as a manual, I'd have a good understanding of the working of the internal combustion engine. I read it as literature. I only learned a little about mechanics and probably won't remember it, so didn't REALLY learn it!

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think I was meant to read this book many years ago. Thankfully, it's never too late to take meaning from it.
I really enjoyed Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance when I read it years ago, but to be honest, that book is very different from this one. ZAMM is a study of metaphysics, and leaves you searching, questing for quality in yourself and life long after reading. Sometimes filling one with anguish in the process.
Truck is a story, a novel in the first person, an account of a an actual truck and the struggles of the author in trying at first to search for the mythical Quality and finding instead the middling ground of compromise that is all engineering, all physical manifestations of the platonic ideal that humans have been hewing out of stone or whatever as long as we've been trying. In some sense, that's depressing, but it makes for a usable produc, and an acceptance of our own mortality, which can be freedom, in a sense. YMMV.

[Jessica DuLong · Rating 5 out of 5]

As I launch into rebuilding yet another cooling-water pump unit for one of fireboat John J. Harvey’s (www.fireboat.org) five diesel engines, I know I’ll be turning to this book for comfort.

I was distraught to learn that Jerome had died in 2002. I’d wanted to mail him a letter thanking him for all the solidarity I felt while reading the narrative of his year-long odyssey restoring a 1950 Dodge, as I struggled through my own battered-knuckle fireboat repairs.

I’m reading it slowly, savoring Jerome’s “meditation on machines, metaphysics, and the moral universe.” Though I work on boats, not trucks, I can totally relate.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I checked this out of the library and saw a quote from Ed Abbey on the back of the jacket, I knew that I was on the right track. John Jerome is full of wry observations, blind dogged determination, and an appropriately muddled feeling of rebellion against high technology. It's more a collection of anecdotes than it is a single coherent story, but well worth your time. As a reader whose own sense of self-sufficiency is often stymied by planned obsolescence, I often identified with the author. Highly recommended.

[Nicole Geary · Rating 4 out of 5]

I could give this 5 stars on the right day, because it's a great read for anyone who falls in love with _process_ (printmakers, pay attention). The book is about rebuilding a truck in the same way that The Big Lebowski is about a kidnapping - it holds interest and moves the story along, but only for the purpose of revealing truths to us through various twists and turns found once you take apart an old truck and then try to put it back together. It is often funny I enjoyed the bittersweet message.

[Brendan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maybe not the most accurate of books when it comes to restoring vehicles. Nevertheless it did tell an amusing story and made some content on the way technology impacts our lives.