Hi all,
Well I said I wasn't going to be in parades until I had a chance to restore
my M35A2....
On the 3rd I was heading to the bank and was diverted by the site of a half
track driving in the field next to the bank, well after a quick turn and a
few hellos to the fellows with the half track I realized I was going to be
in a parade on the 4th :) The guys I hooked up with were getting part of
their bosses collection ready for the parade, they had 3 jeeps a half track
and an APC, they also showed me a couple M35A2s and some neat trailers, I
understand they have in addition to those some other jeeps and a T-6, PT-19
and an L5, wow! All right under my nose , and I never knew it. Well I
decided to clean up the M35 a bit and ended up armoralling the tires ...and
then the rims ...and then the whole darn truck! It made the paint look much
better, not so dry and chalky, after running out of armorall I switched to
WD-40, hehe I think I get better gas mileage now due to the reduced drag! It
was around 1am when I got to the grocery store to buy more flags and about
2:30am before sack time... last minute is always so much fun :) Anyhow I
think I represented the era/vehicle well enough for our parade. There was
only one other Vietnam era vehicle present so I was glad to be a part. One
fellow came walking from about 100 yards out in a beeline straight for us
past all the other MVs in our group as we staged for the parade and just
loved the truck, he was totally all over it and really happy to have a
Vietnam era vehicle in the parade, that made my son and I very proud to be
there, and, that one guys admiration of our old deuce was worth the effort
x10. I took some pics and put them on a simple web page, the pics were
reduced in quality for faster loading as I only run 56k on my server. Link
to them or the pre-purchase pics at :
http://hal3000.cx/~orintz/mv.html
Another cool thing we did on the 5th ( with flags still attached) was to
begin our yearly volunteering at our local little airshow (AirVenture 2001)
One of our duties was to move about 13 ton of pallets out of sales areas and
into temporary storage, we were given a trailer and a half ton pickup, well
I was impressed at how little that combo could haul... 5000lbs almost
squashed the trailer! Needless to say the deuce outhauled the heck out of
the other rig...only had room for 7500lbs with the tarp on but I didn't even
know I had a load on! Real neat ...I guess to many it would be an obvious
and common thing but to our crew and myself I thought it quite neat ... a
piece of history, rolling museum if you will ,cool as heck , green ,
offroads like a champ, and is getting used in a valuable function for a
great cause! Gotta love it :) Sorry for the long post but just had to share!
Orintz
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Aug 07 2001 - 09:34:11 PDT