The Model A Rumble Seat Served Many Purposes

The year was 1946.

One morning while my dad went to move a house, my mom and my aunt went to our corn field to do some chopping of weeds. My aunt had two small children, a boy and a girl younger than I, and I wasn’t but three or four years old. There were no baby sitters in those days so the kids would be taken along to the field. On this occasion they drove my dad’s Model A Ford coupe. When we got to the corn field, they parked the car under a bunch of pecan trees. This coupe model A had a rumble seat, which is nothing more than a large trunk in the back of the car; however when you opened the lid you could take off the hinges and, wa-la, you were left with a mini pick-up bed. The three of us were put into this 3 X 3 foot space with a blanket to sit on. Each was given a small toy to keep us occupied. My toy was a small John Deere tractor. To keep us from crawling out of that little truck bed we were told that my mom spotted a snake in the grass near the car. She warned us to stay in the bed of that car and we would be OK.

My Mom and aunt went to chop in the corn field. I amused myself by pretending to plow up every inch of that rumble seat with my tractor. Right behind the box we were in was the spare tire bolted on top of the bumper. As I reached outward, I also plowed up that entire rubber tire. After a while, I tired of all that plowing so I put down my tractor and decided to explore the front part of our box. I happened to find a small tool box in the far corner in which I found a claw hammer. I turned from farmer to mechanic and proceeded to bang away at every nut, bolt and rivet I could find around me. After I tired of that, I dug a little deeper in the tool box and found a 20-penny nail. Now I became a carpenter and started to drive that nail into each crack and crevice in that steel bed. Of course, the nail wasn’t going too well into that steel bed so I looked around for something softer—and there it was—the rubber spare tire. I lined up that huge nail with my fist wrapped around it and proceeded to pound it into that rubber tire.

Sure enough, it went in pretty easy and after about the 4th or 5th blow, I started to hear a hissing sound. Even my 4-year-old mind told me I had done something wrong. So, I quickly put the hammer and nail back into the tool box and tried to stop all that hissing coming out of that nail hole. I put my thumb over the hole and, after about a minute, the hissing stopped. I figured that whatever I did, did the trick. I forgot about all that and went back to playing with my tractor.

That’s about all there is to tell about this story; however, to this day, I can’t help but wonder just what my dad’s reaction was when he eventually had a flat on that coupe. What did he do or say when, after jacking up the car, taking off the flat tire, replacing it with the spare and finding out when he jacked it down that the spare was just as flat as the one he took off. Only you and I now know the rest of that story.