In 1964, my brother and I were starting up an asphalt paving business in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan. We had a foreman and three college students, an old Layton tow-behind paver, an Eager Beaver ride-on roller, a very small Case dozer, a Galion mini-grader, a Huber-Warco Maintainer, one Ford F600 5-yard dump truck, a Dodge 10 yard tandem dump truck, and one International B180 10 yard tandem dump. Also one Chevy car, a couple of international pickups, and a flatbed of some kind, a Ford I think.
We were doing some small jobs about town one hot summer day and needed a couple of loads to finish up. The local asphalt plant went down, so we decided to send the two tandems over to Saginaw for blacktop so we could finish up. The one truck, the Dodge, returned after a couple of hours and we put that load down, but the other truck, which should have been right behind him, didn't show.
So we waited, and waited , and waited some more. We finally went ahead and chopped off the edge of the mat and prepped it for the night, figuring that something was wrong. No cell phones or radios in those days, so we had no idea what had happened if anything. My brother was driving the truck, and anything was possible with him.
Just about the time we were getting into the other rigs to head for the shop and finish the day, here he comes. The front end of the truck is all smashed to smithereens, with pieces still falling off and pieces of other vehicles still embedded.
This old International was originally a milk truck. In those days raw milk trucks were set up to really haul the mail as the tanks were not insulated and they had to hurry to get the loads of milk to the processing plant before it turned. This particular rig would easily do a hundred miles an hour given some time to get up to speed, and I drove it everywhere at 85 when hauling asphalt and gravel.
It seems that my brother had taken on a full load of asphalt and left the plant. He knew he could easily catch and pass the old Dodge, which did just 55 up hill and down. So he piled on the speed and was really cruising out of Saginaw on Rte 46. There was just one last stoplight left to pass and he would have been in open country all the way back to us, but the light turned red.
Well, he stepped on the brake, and there wasn't any! He hit them again, same result! He tried pumping them up, nothing! So, he looked ahead to the intersection. There was three or fours cars stopped in each direction and he was getting to them fast tho he was trying to down shift to slow up a bit.
One of the cars drivers saw him coming, and tried to warn the other drivers. But there's always one old lady that looks neither left nor right but hits the gas as soon as the light turns green, and so she did. My brother t-boned her in the passenger door doing about 60. The initial hit threw her car about 40 or 50 feet out in front of him, then he hit her again, which caused her to spin around and hit two other cars. By this time the old truck had slowed down considerably and he managed to pull it off the shoulder and get it stopped with the hand brake and shutting the engine off.
He ran back to see who he'd killed or injured and to help get them out of their cars. But to his surprise, no one was dead or even seriously hurt. The old lady was talking gibberish, but was otherwise OK. The cops were amazed when they showed up. So, after a couple of hours, they let him go without even a citation.
The truck had hydra-vac brakes. The hydra-vac unit itself had failed, and without it working, no brakes. My brother had to catch a ride back into Saginaw, find a truck store, buy a new hydra-vac unit and some tools, and go back out and install the new parts. He also had to remove and pull some sheet metal away from the tires and fan, but amazingly enough, nothing major was seriously damaged, the truck would still run and was drivable. Of course, the radiator had a hole in it, so he had to stop about every ten miles at a gas station or creek to refill it with water, and he didn't have any headlights or turn signals, and it was getting dark by that time.
The load of asphalt was still just sitting there in the dump box, cooling off, and he had no idea if it was still going to be usable when he got back to town, so that added a little urgency to things.
As it turned out, other than a few chunks of cold stuff around the edges and the top, the asphalt was still usable and we laid it down, using the headlights from the other trucks and pickups for light. Then, of course, the foreman and I had to work most of the night trying to fix that truck up enough to run the next day. My brother scooted off for home, said he had business to do and he couldn't hang around to help us.
We got her together, and ran that rig the rest of the summer, tho my brother didn't drive the dumps much anymore. I sort of took over those duties. We hunted up used sheet metal parts for a month or so and finally got it looking good again. You couldn't do what we did that day and night today, and get away with it.
