(My grandfather, Warren Lohnes passed away on Sunday. I am rerunning this column from 2009 in his memory.)

I’ll never know 100 percent why, but I have a special place in my heart for slow stuff. I don’t mean cars or trucks that are supposed to be fast and aren’t, but more like stuff that was never intended to be swift in the first place. One reason for this affliction may be the fact that a mid-‘70s Ford F600 truck was just about the first vehicle I ever fell in love with. This affair kicked off well before my 10th birthday.

My dad and grandfather have been operating a small, successful pallet and box business since the early ‘70s. They build and deliver all types of pallets and boxes for an array of customers located around the area. When I was a little kid, they were still operating an older F600 as their primary delivery vehicle (not the truck in the photo). One a semi-regular basis, I’d wake up to a smiling mom telling me that I was going to go out “on deliveries” with my grandfather that day. It was heaven.

That big old F600 would trundle up in front of our house, stacked with what seemed to be 400 feet of pallets and my grandfather would climb out and come get me at the door. This was the earlier part of the ‘80s so it was a point in time when you weren’t required to ride around in a car seat until your 13th birthday. This meant that I plunked down on the springy bench seat, got a lap belt strapped on, and off we went.

The truck was a gear-jammer with a two-speed rearend. The little red push-pull button mounted to the mile-long shifter always seemed to be calling my name. When the time came to need to operate it, if we were going to be hitting the highway or something of that nature, my granddad would let me do the honors of operating the button. It was just heavenly stuff.

This was a truck devoid of options. Honestly, I think if Ford didn’t include the seat, we may have been riding on milk crates. Its one true creature comfort was the radio, an AM unit that introduced my ears to the wonders of jazz music. The truck was powered by an odd displacement truck big-block gas motor.

Our trips were mostly local jaunts to customers that had ordered pallets or boxes. Each stop brought someone who had been dealing with my dad and grandfather for years. The guys on the loading docks knew my grandfather and he introduced them to me. My job would be to take the chock blocks out of the side-mounted tool box which was under the wood deck flatbed and place them behind the rear wheels to prevent the truck from moving when the forklift drove on to pull the load off the truck. Most of our days also included a great lunch at a local restaurant/diner that still operates today and makes me smile every time I drive by.

On at least two occasions I remember taking a couple of long drives to the holy grail of coolness for a kid: a saw mill. I cannot pinpoint why we were picking up lumber as the majority of the stock gets delivered to the shop, but I can remember huge forklifts moving bundles of wood around and getting some kind of tour of the place. The huge saws and deafening noise sold me on the fact that this was the neatest place ever. I of course had the opinion that we were also rolling in the coolest truck made.

My grandfather was (and still is) a very good driver, a true pro. As a kid you think about all these cars passing you and whizzing by, kind of wondering if it’s bugging him that the world seems to be saying in a not so subtle voice, “HURRY UP!” I know now that it never did bug him, nor should it have. The truck was doing its job and that was fine with us. I came to really appreciate the yeoman vibe that the truck threw off and it opened my eyes to the fact that not everything needs chrome, loud pipes, or even the ability to roast the tires at the drop of a hat. All that stuff is nice, but for every party kid, there’s another with his head to the grindstone getting the work done and that was this F600.

As it turns out, my grandfather is still at it every day, although not in the old Ford any more. He’s also equipped with a Sirius satellite radio and he toggles between his two loves which are Jazz and Howard Stern. The latter topic cracks me up to no end because in nearly 30 years of knowing him, I’ve never heard a curse word cross his lips. He finds Howard funny and I love him all the more for it.

The epilogue to this story is that three days a week or so, as I am driving to my office in the morning, I see, without fail, a flatbed truck stacked with what seems to be 400 feet of pallets, lettered with “Lohnes Pallet” on the door. Grandpa always has his eyes straight ahead on the road and short of shooting flares at him, he never sees me, but I see him, lumbering along in that big truck. It reminds me every time that slow and cool are not mutually exclusive.