I Just Said Goodbye To My Two Best Trucks Because I’m A Family Man Now

My rapid transition from The Singlest Man In America to a husband and father and homeowner means I must do something I rarely had to when I was single and snatching every sub-$3000 manual transmission rustbucket off Craigslist: make sacrifices. And offered at the altar of the family-man gods this past month were two of my favorite vehicles: My 1989 Chevy K1500 and my Jeep J10. I feel weird about it.

It’s amazing how the human mind can adapt to vastly new situations. In the span of 2.5 years, I went from being perpetually single and owning a bunch of rusty junkers in a rental shack in Troy, Michigan, to getting married to a great woman, having a hilariously cute child, and now moving into a 100-year-old house. Talk about a total 180!

Such a 180 required a significant adaptation in my mindset — one that, I’ll admit, remains a work in progress. You see, for pretty much my whole life up until about a year ago or so, I acted impulsively. If I saw a car I liked, I bought it; in fact, I created the mantra “Buy First, Think Later” because that was actually my philosophy for well over a decade. The result is that I’ve owned some really stellar automobiles, from my 1965 Plymouth Valiant winter beater to my 1994 Jeep Grand Cherokee “Holy Grail” to my 1958 Willys FC-170 to 1948 Willys CJ-2A to my Lexus LX470 to my Chevy Tracker and on and on.

Two of my favorite vehicles I’ve ever owned have been trucks, namely these two:

The most recent purchase was my 1989 Chevy K1500, a manual transmission, 350 V8-powered extended cab 4×4 without a spec of rust and only 130,000 miles on the odometer. It helped my wife and me move across town, and overall was just a phenomenal machine. Sure, it had a cracked windshield, a broken odometer, no headliner, an engine that bucked under heavy loads, and rough paint, but it was still an absolutely phenomenal pickup truck, especially for the $4,900 I paid for it.

But now it’s gone.

Also gone is my 1985 Jeep J10, a vehicle I owned since I started as a car journalist back in 2015. That’s over a decade! This is my most interesting car, and definitely my dream truck. But I’ve had to come to grips with reality:

First, even though I have the truck tagged in Michigan, something about the truck not being registered in CA makes me feel… weird. I live here, so technically my car should be registered here. And though I haven’t tried getting my J10 through smog, there’s no point. The catalytic converter has been rattling for years, and more importantly, someone pulled the original carburetor and all the emissions equipment off the engine years ago.

I have no interest in choking my engine up with the original emissions equipment, and I have no time to do an engine swap.

Just as important is the rust situation. The J10 is from North Carolina and spent most of its life on the farm. So, though it doesn’t have much rust, it does have holes where dirt collected, and that was in the door jambs and on the back of the cab (where dirt was trapped between that cab and the rear bed-cap). The floors, too, have holes. You can see some of the rust in the video I shot way back in 2015:

Suffice it to say: The rust hasn’t gotten better since that video was shot, and in truth, though Southern California is a great place if you want to prevent your vehicle from rusting, if your vehicle is already rusty, the heat only catalyzes the rusting process.

In the past, I would have just kept both trucks, or the very least, one of them. But now there’s opportunity cost that’s impossible to ignore. That Chevy truck sold for $7250; how can I have that money tied up in that truck that I rarely use, when maybe I could use that money to fix my house’s plumbing or invest in my son’s future? The J10 is a vehicle I love, and I do enjoy driving around in it, but when am I going to find time to fix the rust? Am I really going to swap in an engine to get it through smog? Where is that time going to come from? I already have two personal Jeep projects, my manual Jeep ZJ and my original Jeep XJ — two vehicles that are more important to me than the J10. To take on the J10 as a restoration project on top of those is just unrealistic.

The reality is that, in the context of my new life as a sole breadwinner-father-homeowner, expenses require me to be more thoughtful about tying up money in my cars. “Buy First, Think Later” doesn’t work anymore. And what’s more, time is now at a premium, which is to say: I have none.

To me, what made sense was to part ways with the J10 since I just don’t have time to fix it. I still wanted a Jeep truck, though, as I love them. So I parted ways with the Chevy as well and purchased my 1992 Jeep Comanche, which — with a new $350 catalytic converter and another $300 in exhaust work — got through smog without issue.

And so, my beloved J10 is now gone (Well, technically it’s not sold yet; it’s in Michigan awaiting a buyer). The Chevy is sold, and I have now successfully replaced two trucks with one. I’ll miss the Chevy, because it was deeply competent. And of course, I’ll miss the unmatched handsome looks of that J10.

Though I’m sad about it, I welcome my new responsibilities. Plus, I think my fleet — a Comanche, a YJ, an i3, two boxy Jeep SUV projects, and my brother’s Mustang — is still more than enough to keep the car-geek in me satisfied. And for that I am immensely grateful, even if it was tough to say goodbye to these two fantastic pickups.

Top graphic image: David Tracy