T-bucket

EXTREMELY well-done. (iPhone photo by BobbaLew.)

—“SHADES OF THE ‘60s. Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth LIVES ON!”
So said retired bus-driver *** *******, an actual friend, not just a Facebook “friend.”
I put the above picture on my own Facebook so I could screenshot it for my brother ****, who like me appreciates hotrods — I think he does.
**** is not in my iPhone e-mail contacts — not yet.
All I could do is post it to my own Facebook, so I could screenshot it and e-mail to him via this laptop.
Every week I eat out one night per week with other bereaved friends. I’m the token male; all the others are widows.
I been doing it for years. Another guy ate with us a while, but disappeared.
Last week we patronized “Eddie O’Brien’s Grille and Bar,” a restaurant in downtown Canandaigua.
Finished we returned to the parking-lot to get our cars.
Yrs Trly noticed the canvas-top of the car pictured poking above the surrounding cars.
So what do we have here?
I kept walking, and BEHOLD, the fabulous T-Bucket pictured above.
“This thing is worth a photograph,” I said to myself as I unholstered my iPhone.
I thereafter studied the car, a hot-rodded Model-T pickup; although you couldn’t truck anything in a pickup bed only four by three feet, and only a foot deep.
The bed was covered, and had a gas-cap on top. “So that’s where the gas goes,” I said to myself.
The steering-column was almost vertical, putting the steering wheel in your lap like a dinner plate.
Enter my brother ****, stage-right, a Chevy-man like me.
“Only one problem,” he’d say. “It ain’t the Chevy SmallBlock.”
Correct; the center header-pipes aren’t siamesed. They would be on a Chevy SmallBlock.
So it looks like Ford’s small-block, introduced in the ‘60s.
Given my ‘druthers I prefer the turtle-deck T’s over the pickups.
But this car is extremely well done, even if it is a pickup.
It even has disc brakes up front, although I wouldn’t expect much braking out of bicycle tires.
I could do without the flames, but it’s extremely attractive.
Regrettably it would be just a toy, but great fun to tool around in, or just display in car-shows.
Relive those hoary days of teendom when we kroozed the streets hoping to avoid cherry-top.
As I approach age-80, hotrods lose their attraction. But this car could change my mind.

• One could say the car pictured is something Roth would do. But it’s not far out enough — it's too conventional.
• For 16&1/2 years (1977-1993) Yrs Trly drove transit bus for Regional Transit Service (RTS) in Rochester, NY, a public employer, the transit-bus operator in Rochester and environs. *** ******* was a fellow bus-driver. My heart-defect caused stroke October 26th, 1993 ended that. I retired on medical-disability, and that defect was repaired. I recovered well enough to return to work at a newspaper; I retired from that almost 15 years ago.
• The car pictured in this link is a “turtle-deck T.”
• “Cherry-top” is the police. Early patrol-cars had a single rotating beacon on top, with a red translucent housing. Lit up it looked like a cherry.