1959 truck, i should have never parted with her!

• Auction

In about 1980 my dad tried to buy a '64 half ton GMC from him as our '66 stepside (with the 301 V6) was rusted to the point it was unsafe to drive. He wouldn't sell anything. I was deer hunting on his land last week and I saw that same truck, now with four flats rusted into the tall grass, the wood bed rotted away and a poplar tree grown through the bed. What a shame.

Sometimes being stuck in the mud procrastinator pays off. My mother's first cousin looked like Joseph Stalin (big brushy mustache to cover up his missing top teeth) and was bass ackwards in his farming. He never changed anything if he could help it. While everyone else in the county was using hybrid corn seeds, he was year-after-year using his prior year's harvest for his planting seed. Some of you may recall the corn rust that swept across the country in the late 1960's that was particularly damaging to many hybrid corn varieties. Cousin Emmett was contacted by his County Agent in late January about his field of "antique" corn which was still standing on stalk!! The field probably had a yield of less than 50 bushels per acre. The upshot of the matter is that Cousin Emmett got a fortune for his corn and did not even have to harvest it (the corn company bought it on stalk and harvested it by hand). The corn was immediately shipped to Mexico and was rushed into off season pollination/breeding work with existing hybrid varieties. The gist was that modern hybrids were susceptible to this rust but that 1940's era corn varieties were immune).

I'm bad to procrastinate and keep far too much junk around, but often wonder if Cousin Emmett's particular field of corn is still genetically present in today's corn. So, if you've got the room and don't need the money, maybe it's not so bad keeping old stuff around.