Herb Savage’s Model T isn’t a show car. It’s what he drives to town, to the dump, to visit friends. It’s his car, or rather, his pick-up. It was built in 1924, four years after Savage himself was built.
Savage invited me to go visit a guy named Gumbs up in Canterbury. I was glad to go. I’d never ridden in a T before and never met a guy named Gumbs.
Savage and his best friend Suzie picked me up in Hanover on the first day of November. Suzie rode in back for the elbow room; I rode in front for the full T experience, which in Savage’s T includes a lot of fresh air. Bombing down Canterbury’s Walker Road, a woodsy shortcut with grass down the middle and puddles deeper than they look, the experience comes to include water splashing up over the windshield.
Savage doesn’t coddle his T. Walker Road’s nothing to a car that’s been around since Calvin Coolidge was president and Babe Ruth was king.
Sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with Savage, I realize that driving a T is a lot like riding a horse. It depends more on feel and persuasion than on gauges and control.
It’s also a lot like knitting while doing the foxtrot. You shift from low to high with a pedal on the left, brake with a pedal on the right, throw it into reverse with the pedal in the middle, accelerate with the fingers of your right hand while tending to the timing with the fingers of your left while your hands in the middle keep the car dancing in a pretty straight line.
Thirty miles an hour is plenty fast in a car like this. You can exchange words with bicyclists as you pull around them. You can notice the color of a falling leaf. You can give a squirrel a chance to change its mind. You can honk to people raking in the yard, and the people have time to take a hand off their rakes and wave.
People love to wave at a Model T, and Savage loves to honk. It’s a good honk, a honk that goes way back.
Savage doesn’t just have a Model T. He practically is a Model T. He drove his first at the age of 9, when he used his father’s to spread manure on a field off Savage Road in Preston. He bought his own for $2 at the age of 12.
He was 23 when he joined the army, 24 when he found himself standing on the radioactive rubble of Hiroshima, a flat desert with a few scorched skeletons of buildings. It was quite a sight for a kid from the fields of eastern Connecticut.
He remembers the burnt wheels of trolleys that had been blown apart. He doesn’t remember thinking that maybe technology had gone too far.
We sputter past the hay fields of Woodchuck Hill and the woods of Bates Pond, around the switchbacks of Gooseneck Hill, over the Quinebaug at Butts Bridge, and into the embrace of the yellow maples that arch over Barstow.
Marty Gumbs has a farm and welding shop there. Savage drops the tailgate so Suzie can hop down.
Gumbs has a new 1926 pick-up out of Wisconsin Rapids. An old timer had traded it in on something a little newer, and the used car dealer put it up to auction on eBay.
On the basis of six pictures and testimony that the thing ran, Gumbs took it with a bid of $5,000. For $900 he got it trucked to Canterbury.
Savage puts his lanky fingers to the black paint and says, “I’d say you’ve got a nice car here.”
Nice but not perfect. The oil filter leaks a little, and one tire looks too busted for hope. It went flat up in Plainfield on Gumbs’ first ride. Now it’s off the rim and he can’t get it back on.
That’s the main reason Savage’s here. A person can change a Model T tire with just a couple of screwdrivers if a person knows how, but Gumbs isn’t one of those people. He apologizes, says he’s just a beginner at this. Savage says, “We all were once. We all had to learn. That’s why I’m here.”
So he’s here to fix a flat and teach somebody how. But he’s also here for mysterious reasons that relate to Suzie, Hiroshima, knitting, leaf rakes, the good honk, and the way the world’s going.
Savage says Gumbs’ car is a rare case of an original: original motor on its original chassis. At some point in the last 80 years the floor of the truck bed was replaced with plywood, but Gumbs is going to pull it out, put in “something more authentic.”
He’s going to get some spare condensers, too. Savage tells him to look for old ones. They aren’t so flimsy.
It takes four hands to start Gumb’s T: one for the timing lever, one for the gas lever, one for the choke, one for something under the hood.
Gumbs tries it twice. The motor coughs a few times but doesn’t catch. Savage sets the choke just so and says to try it again. At a precise moment between the second and third cough, his hand darts from the engine to the choke, snaps it in, darts back to the engine. It clears its throat, mutters something that sounds like yes, and settles into the quiet, confident sputter of a good car ready to go somewhere.
Savage folds his bones down to pick up Suzie and ease her into the back of his T. She’s a little gray at the muzzle but has a lot of miles left in her.
Savage pulls the wooden stopper from the milk can he keeps on his running board, tilts it to Suzie so she can lap up a little water. She sticks half her head in there and laps a lot, her tail steady with concentration.
Her lapping echoes in the half-empty can. Savage holds it till she’s done.
Glenn Cheney is the author of “Thanksgiving: The Pilgrims’ First Year in America.” He lives in Hanover.
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