Wes Scott’s Speed Wagon

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The following is from the Autumn 2015 issue of Air Cooled News (An Official Publication of The Franklin Club)

In 1933, The Reo Automobile Company shipped 800 leftover 1933 Reo “Flying Clouds” to the Franklin Automobile Company. Franklin engines were installed and they were sold as 1933 Franklin “Olympics.”

In 1934 Reo still had unsold “Flying Clouds” so they decided to cut them off behind the front door and build pickup trucks. It is possible that at least one of these pickup trucks was shipped to Franklin where an air cooled 1934 Franklin engine was installed and it was sold as a 1934 Franklin “Speed Wagon.” If that did happen, the truck cold have looked exactly like this one.

In 2012, Wes Scott traded a Model A truck for the remains of a 1933 Franklin “Olympic.” This would provide the chassis for the Franklin “Speed Wagon.” In 2013 Wes’ son Donald found a 1934 Reo Speed Wagon in Shaniko, Oregon. This would provide the cab.

The bed for the “Speed Wagon” came from a Reo pickup in West Plains, Missouri. Richard Harry of Wisconsin provided an extra set of fenders so pickup rear fenders could be made from two sets of sedan fenders.

Another Franklin Club member, Ed Joy of Idaho provided a nice green hood that matched what was left of the original paint on the cab. The goal was to make all the pieces look like they came on the truck originally and to build a truck that could be used and enjoyed. At the Fall Midwest Region Meet in Clinton, MO the comments ranged from “When are you going to paint it?” to “Don’t touch it we like it.”

Wes is going with “Don’t touch it.”

Wes’ garage/shop/farm is just about 20 minutes from where I live and some car buddies drove me down and introduced me. Wes was kind enough to let me record a little video (5 min) of his amazing collection of Franklins and Model A Fords.

This brief video barely scratched the surface (you should forgive the expression) of Wes’s amazing collection. I hope to have another opportunity share some more.

Additional photos on Flickr »

Sell me in thirty seconds

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In my dozen years in small town radio I wrote a lot of commercials. Mostly thirty-second “spots” but lots of :60’s (more expensive). It wasn’t uncommon to finish a four-hour on-air shift and sit down at a manual typewriter and bang out ten or fifteen “spots” working from a newspaper “tear sheet” or a salesperson’ scribbled notes. And most of these commercials were scheduled to begin airing the following day so someone had to get in the studio and produce the ad. Point being, there was little demand or time for creativity and the sponsor wasn’t inclined to pay for it in any event.

For a variety of reasons, a :30 second ad had to be :30 seconds. Not 27, not 32. So we followed a rigid format. Given a normal reading speed, a thirty second ad was about 75 words, usually eight lines. Yeah, you could try to get cute and clever but the client wanted to hear about his business. His products or services. And if the client was a supermarket… price-and-item. As many as you could jam in.

So, no, this was rarely creative writing. It was short, simple, declarative sentences. Not a word or phrase to be wasted. I like to think I still write this way.

When email took over from letters and faxes people wrote long-winded tomes that went on for paragraphs. I went through a phase where I would put my entire message in the subject line with “see above” in the body. If it needed more space than that, I would call them or go see them. To this day I think of this approach as “write like you talk.” Which was the final test for radio commercials: reading the copy aloud before going into the studio.

“Being negative also helps you appear smart”

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Following thoughts from an article (Chicken Littles Are Ruining America) by David Brooks in The Atlantic. (No link because it’s behind a paywall). He warns “doomsaying can become a self-fulfilling prophecy)

Being negative also helps you appear smart. In a classic 1983 study by the psychologist Teresa Amabile, authors of scathingly negative book reviews were perceived as more intelligent than the authors of positive reviews. Intellectually insecure people tend to be negative because they think it displays their brain power.

Believing in vicious conspiracy theories can also boost your self-esteem: You are the superior mind who sees beneath the surface into the hidden realms where evil cabals really run the world. You have true knowledge of how the world works, which the masses are too naive to see. Conspiracy theories put you in the role of the truth-telling hero. Paranoia is the opiate of those who fear they may be insignificant.

 

Target practice

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Some years back I had a sheriff’s deputy do a security check of our home. He looked at the locks on our doors and places around the house where someone could… lurk? He didn’t find anything obvious. I asked about best firearm for home protection and he immediately said shotgun. A few weeks later I purchased a Remington Model 870 12 gauge. I had some reservations about having a gun in the house but decided I’d rather have a gun and not need it, etc etc. It occurred to me I’d be much more likely to pull the trigger if I could do so without killing the intruder so I investigated “less lethal ammunition” for the shotgun.

Once a year I take the 12 gauge into our woods and fire off a few rounds, just to stay familiar with the weapon. The weight, the recoil, the sound, etc.
I was firing from about 20 feet from the targets on the assumption I’d never be farther away from someone who got inside our house. The blue circles are the wadding from the shotgun shells; the yellow is birdshot; and the green is 00 Buckshot. I’m not a great shot but with a shotgun you really don’t have to be.

Saturday Night at the Movies

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While endlessly scrolling through the hundreds (thousands?) of movie titles in Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, HBO Max, and all the other streaming services, I flashed back to my youth (‘50s and ‘60s) when watching a movie on TV was a rare treat. Following from Wikipedia:

NBC Saturday Night at the Movies was the first TV show to broadcast relatively recent feature films from major studios. The series premiered on September 23, 1961, and ran until October 1978, spawning many imitators. Previously, television stations had been only been able to show older, low-budget, black-and-white films that wouldn’t be shown at movie theaters. In the late 1970s, competition from cable television and home video led to a decline in viewership.

It’s difficult to convey what a treat it was to watch a feature-length movie on network TV. The “late show” usually came on right after the ten o’clock news and ran into the wee hours with lots of commercials. We could never have imagined watching almost any film ever produced. Never mind on-demand streaming to a hand-held device.

YouTube isn’t just a platform. It’s infrastructure.

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The excerpts below are from an article adapted from a blog post by Ryan McGrady. Ryan McGrady is a senior researcher with the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and a researcher with Media Cloud and the Media Ecosystems Analysis Group.

There are 14 billion videos on YouTube. More than one and a half videos for every person on the planet and that’s counting those that are publicly visible.

According to McGrady, YouTube started (February 2005) as a video platform, “but it has since become the backbone of one of the 21st century’s core forms of communication.”

Videos with 10,000 or more views account for nearly 94 percent of the site’s traffic overall but less than 4 percent of total uploads. Just under 5 percent of videos have no views at all, nearly three-quarters have no comments, and even more have no likes.

I uploaded my first video to YouTube on February 12, 2006 and more than 560 videos since. Those videos have been viewed 1,171,459 times for a total watch time of 19,171 hours. Amazingly, (to me) my channel has accounted for 3,376 views in the last 28 days. From day one I have had no interest in comments or likes and I never considered trying to monetize my videos. I always saw it as a place to park my videos so I could include them in a blog post.

I cannot argue with McGrady’s view that “YouTube is now less an opportunity than a requirement—something you have to use, because basic elements of society have organized around it.” 

Icy hill 2024

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Regular readers know we live at the top of a pretty steep hill, at the end of a gravel road. This week’s weather left our hill slipperier than I’ve ever seen it. Nobody was getting up or down. The truck above belongs to a man who delivers part-time for Amazon and he was trying to bring a package to us. Dude, we can wait.

Four or five years ago our neighbor braved the hill trying to get to church. It was not god’s will. And way back in 2008 I recorded one of my more popular videos: Icy Road of Death. I wouldn’t live anywhere else.