Stallard: Driving my life away

Published 10:35 pm Thursday, July 24, 2025

The first time I got behind the steering wheel of a vehicle, I was 12.

I was sitting in class at Everman Junior High up near Fort Worth when the speaker in the classroom buzzed and I was told to report to the principal’s office.

I couldn’t recall anything I had done that particular morning that would warrant a paddling, detention, suspension or jail time, so I wasn’t too worried about why I was being summoned to see Mr. A.P. O’Connor.

When I arrived at the office, I was informed my brother Gary was waiting in the parking lot to take me to the dentist appointment I didn’t know I had.

I’ll save some details for another column, but there was no dentist appointment – just a big brother who wanted his little brother to tag along with him on an unplanned trip to the lake.

I was a little surprised why no one in charge questioned the two-man raft strapped on top of Gary’s car, and I was shocked when Gary tossed me his keys and said, “You’re driving. Let’s roll.”

I moved back to Tennessee after that school year. I didn’t get an actual driver’s license until I was 18, but like most kids who grew up in the country, it just meant we had to drive the old, dented truck to the grocery store to buy cigarettes for dad instead of taking the nice car.

My son nearly fainted when I told him that, by the way.

I paid $750 for my first car in 1984. It was a 1975 Honda Civic, and I drove it like a tank – wrecking it twice and once getting it stuck all the way up to the driver side window in a mud pit while trying to keep up with my buddy and his Jeep.

When I became sports editor at the Kilgore News Herald in 1987, I purchased a 1987 Ford Ranger truck. About five months later, I wrecked it during an ice storm. It took more than 100 stitches to put me back together, but the truck was a goner.

I replaced it with a 1988 Ford Ranger, and drove it for the next nine years before trading it in for a used (1995) Ford F150 – my first big truck.

In 2008, my lovely wife called me and told me she was looking at my dream truck and I needed to come see it quickly.

The truck was a 2006 Ford F150, much more loaded than the one I was driving, and it didn’t take me long to decide to go into debt again.

That truck is now almost 20 years old, and after my trip to Bullard on Thursday to cover the Southwest Junior College Football Conference’s annual Media Day, the odometer reads 296,800 miles.

I made a Facebook post a few weeks back with photos of the four trucks I’ve owned over the past 38 years, and I nearly had longtime friends (and even one family member) “unfriend” me.

I should have known better since at my wedding the ushers didn’t ask “friends of the bride or groom?” They asked “Ford or Chevy?”

Folks in East Texas are serious about their trucks, and what brand they drive, and I have no issues with that.

My dad was a Chevy man, but he forgave me for buying a Ford after I told him I only did so because the guys at the Chevy place made fun of the previously-mentioned Honda I had offered up as a trade-in.

I’m loyal that way.

That Honda was ugly, had been wrecked a few times, leaked oil and overheated when I drove it onto the lot, but it was the first car I ever drove legally.

As for that first driving lesson back when I was 12?

Gary’s car was a 1968 Ford Galaxy, so maybe I was always a Ford man and just didn’t know it.

— Jack Stallard is sports editor of the News-Journal. Email: jack.stallard@news-journal.com; follow on X @lnjsports.