The Greatest Truck in the Whole World
I just learned that a hero of my childhood died in 2015. I need to pay tribute to him, for he gave my early years a few of their most exhilarating moments. This piece is about old-school stock car races and dragstrips, and the adventures of boys in a small American town.
I was born in a farm town in Southern Illinois, Shawneetown. This postage stamp of Americana near the Ohio River boasted 2,000 residents and was as flat as the surrounding cornfields. In the early 1960s, when I was a first-grader and could go anywhere in town my feet or my bicycle could take me, by myself, the most exciting things that ever happened were the carnival that would show up once a year on the town square and, a few miles away, stock car races.
My uncle John drove a car at the racetrack when he had the chance. I got to see him wreck into an electrical box and knock out the lights to the whole track. I was sitting next to Granny Johnson at the time and I thought she was going to have a heart attack. My dad would sometimes take me down to the oval inside the track and let me hang out with the mechanics and their kids during races. This, I thought, was the center of the universe – a privilege few boys in the whole world would ever savor. Standing inside that track on a Saturday night under the lights, smelling hot engines and the burning rubber of slick tires, in imminent threat of being pulverized to smithereens by an out-of-control car, was paradise.
Away from the track, the coolest person in my world and in the worlds of every other boy in town, was this guy named Bill Golden, who was born in Shawneetown and grew up to become a Drag Racing Hall of Fame legend best known for his tricked-out red Dodge pickup named the Little Red Wagon. Golden’s nickname was Maverick, because he did things that amazed his crowds.
Maverick worked the racing circuit across the country but would occasionally return to Shawneetown and bring Little Red Wagon with him. When kids in town learned he was around, we would jump on our bikes and ride over to where the truck was parked. Get this – I am not making this up. That truck could do a wheelie – an honest-to-God wheelie. A wheelie, in a truck!
They buried Maverick in Westwood Cemetery, just outside Shawneetown, the same place my dad is buried. I’ve been to Paris, I’ve been to Mardi Gras in New Orleans and I’ve ridden a horse in the canyons of Texas at sunset, but I have never seen anything more awesome than the Little Red Wagon and I never will.
Guy D. Johnson is a writer and marketing communications professional. Previously an animation studio owner, daily newspaper editor, reporter and photographer, volunteer fireman, railroad bridge gang helper, FM radio station underling and cave guide. He has lived on farmland trusted to the sun and rain; atop a wooded hill; beside great rivers; upon an arid, high plateau; and at the subtropical coast of the Gulf of Mexico. For 20 years, he worked and wrote in New Orleans.