Monday, October 13, 2014

Mr Sharkey, Doyen Of Our Housetrucking Fraternity Celebrates Forty Years Of Alternative Lifestyling...

One of the best known characters of the worldwide Housetrucking fraternity and a source of all knowledge, especially relating to North American housetrucks and buses, celebrated forty years of alternative lifestyling recently.
Mr Sharkey was reminiscing with me and
I thought I'd share a little of him with you.
Forty years ago on October 10th, 1974, 
I purchased a 1962 Chevrolet C40 moving van from Crest Cabinet shop in Los Angeles, California with the intent of turning it into a dwelling and escaping the hell-hole and human-zoo of that city. 
On the way home, it was barely running, there was a huge Y-shaped crack in the windscreen, and the brakes were mostly for wishful thinking. 
I pulled into a Mobil service station 
to put some gas in it. 
There were two diminutive Japanese men attending the station, and they got quite a lot of merriment from my asking for $1.00 worth of regular grade petrol. They walked around the truck, throwing their arms wide and repeating "One dolla!!! One dolla!!! HAHAHAHA!!!", obviously enjoying the fact that I wasn't going to be getting very far in this big truck 
on a couple of gallons. 
Gas was $0.50 a gallon then.
Here's to the next forty years my friend...


5 comments:

  1. I had not thought about pulling into a gas station and buying $2 worth of regular in some time...
    In '74 I was living in a Chevy step van in Sonoma Grove while going to Sonoma State College.

    I had not about either of those things for some time.

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  2. It's a beautiful truck...... I had an old chevrolet with side wings when I lived in Canada in the seventies.....it was HUGE as I thought then but cost next to nothing to run....Maybe gas was 50 Cents a gallon in Canada in those days too - I don't remember

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  3. I'd say Mr Sharkey could tell a story or two, after 40 years.
    Hats off to you Mate!

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  4. We converted an old cookie delivery truck in 1972 and drove around the USA (mostly west coast). I remember the days of 50 cent per gal. gas. We would get about $2 worth, until the next hitch hiker could chip in. Fun days, when you actually pick up hippie hitch hikers and get two dollars of gasoline and a joint.

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  5. Happy anniversary for so many years of staying with the right path for living!

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