Here is a story of the formation of the Slick 60's club.
Posted: July 11, 2013, 4:46 pm
If you have ever wondered how it happened here it is !.. I'll warn you its not short..
First of all I do not remember life before my pops 66 F100. that is because he bought it when I was three or four years old. He had spotted it at an old gas station for sale. Apparently a farmer had a bad year and the fuel company repossessed it and sold it to my Dad.
I don't recall what he payed for it but when he bought it 50 some years ago my Moms now famous quote was
"Carl, we will NEVER get our money out of that truck."
Well as it sits now it still has the same motor in it, it runs and drives...and that truck has been used hard.
I can't even begin to tell you the history of that truck, but it has been used as a business truck to pull trailer loads of bailed paper, scrap steel, It even once pulled a 40 plus foot long mobile home
under the cover of darkness down to our lake lot at Lake Red Rock. It was our camper, our boat hauler, it did everything we ever asked it to..
I learned to drive in it at age 14, and it would have been my first car if it wasn't for the gas crunch of the late 70's
I always loved the truck, it was loud and tough.. as a kid I would sit with the JC Whitney catalog and make lists of all the garish chrome aftermarket parts I could find ! hahaha
Dad and Mom moved out to a farm after I had left home, and eventually I bought a house and then a 64 with possibilities. I learned a lot about mechanics, auto body and painting on that truck.. But I never forgot about Dads 66.
Now most of you know that we slick owners are few and far between. I don't recall knowing anyone other than my Dad that really loved them. I always felt I was the LAST guy that loved them. So imagine my surprise one day when I went to a car show (which I seldom do) and there amongst the 100,000 dollar customs is an old faded 64 long box. I mean it was right out of some alley or field, it even had a dent where a tree had grown up and bent the fender.. I decided right then and there, I gotta meet the guy that had the nerve to drive this in here. So I asked some people nearby if it belonged to them, they said
"No, but he is with us and will be right back"
So I hung around long enough to meet Kid, we hit it off right away,Next thing you know we are hanging out at his garage where he is just waiting for a small push to start working. I show him my 64 which has sort of turned into a project of insanity, I started taking it apart and couldn't quit until it was ALL apart, then I was pretty anal about it being anything other than the best I could make it on my own..
So Kid starts working on his truck, and buying more trucks, then I bought more trucks, then we had trucks stashed all over the place, We even made parts runs to Texas, everywhere it just starts exploding... we started stopping and saying hi to anyone in a Slick we would see...Anything in the paper was a must go visit, we knew all the trucks in the local junkyards.
One day I am online and I see this EXCITE site has FREE CLUBS, I sort of looked at it, and doubting it was really free I started playing with their options, next thing I know I had picked a picture, and called it (61 to 66 Ford F-series pickups). I had to make up a user name, and on all the Aquarium boards I had been using FOODSTICK ,which is a fish food I used in my tanks.. So ah, I just used it here as well.
At this time neither kid or I were very internet savvy ...we looked at stuff, but didn't really add to it much. I sent him the address to the club, and thought I would let him in on the joke. The funny thing was I had just been at his house, and I was making posts about how I was just at this ( friends house), and told him what I had just done AT HIS HOUSE! it was a way to sort of laugh at ourselves. kid joins up and plays along, after a few days we had some posts stacked up, and I sort of figured we would get tired of it. I guess it was like we had built a new tree house and eventually forget about it.
Days later however I am talking to Kid and he says
" Are you making up new names and joining, and posting on the site"
I can still recall being confused, thinking he was joking, and then nearly choking when I realized SOMEBODY THOUGHT THE CLUB WAS REAL ! I actually was scared about misleading people and thought about erasing it before people realized it was just two guys joking around. I nervously went to the site, and there are some new names, friendly people saying ..
"Can I join? "I thought I was the only person that liked these trucks"
We weren't alone! There were people just like Kid and I ... so people start trickling in, Kid and I start searching the web for Slick owners.. there couldn't have been more than 20 pictures of Slicks on the entire web, we would send emails and invites anytime we found someones email address. We kept hearing
"I thought I was alone!" and "This truck has been in my family 30-40 years" " It was my Dads, Grampas ,or Uncles"
At first a few people thought Kid was " My KID!) hahahah we soon had that straightened away, and before long we had many Son's and Fathers involved.
I was getting very touching emails from peoples parents
"Thank you for being so nice to my son about his truck, he is only 14 and he has never shown so much interest in anything before , he loves the club"
Another of our members with some difficult health issues once told us
"I had no desire and interest in much of anything anymore.. but for the first time in a long time I am up in the morning with something I WANT to work on, and I feel like I have friends out there, and I am making friends right here"
I even had one young man write me and ask me ..
"Can you please remove that cussing someone posted , My parents will not let me visit the board if they think it has profanity on it"
At times it was nothing short of humbling.
There are so many stories of really interesting owners and trucks, and there have been some really stressful times when people have misunderstood what we were trying to do, and decided they wanted to blow off steam at someone. At times people have gotten mad over censored posts, or Brand X conflicts. We have always tried to make it friendly, Kid and I figure there are a BILLION places on the net to fight ,troll, and yell. Why not keep this a place to chat with friends about trucks.
Its real easy to go from teasing among friends to mistaking sarcasm or a joke with an intended insult. I suppose that will always be a problem. The emoticon smileys do help if used to show humor...
Back to the story, the momentum just builds and builds, at one point on Excite or Yahoo clubs we ranked number one for active posts in the club section ! People would accidentally check the ... EMAIL ME ALL POSTS option...when they signed up, they would get hundreds of emails in a couple days !!! I think we were near half a million page views by the second year, Everyone on the board joked ..
"Half of them are mine !"
Now Kid is really into the car club thing, and he would mention to me how much he always wanted to be in a real club that was like our online club. I was hesitant, I mean we really had gathered a big active crowd, I wasn't sure what was going to happen. From the start we had kept the money out of the club, no dues, just contribute your time and enthusiasm. I was afraid money could mess it all up, and Kid agreed.
I was in the t-shirt business,and the day came when I said to Kid
"Do you want to make this more REAL, and sell some T-shirts to the guys that are interested?"
Well as I have described it before, Kid was like a dog let off a leash, I mean he was off and there was no turning back. it wasn't long and we were handing out homemade club cards, we really started trying to find people, and we were finding them nearly as fast as they were finding us.
The t-shirts idea took off on the board, guys out of state said
"Can it be National ? I want one!",
So we ran the first batch as a National club, it was sort of a inside joke to all of us. Suddenly guys from Canada say what about us? Could it be INTERNATIONAL? We sort of figured sure that was even funnier than it being a NATIONAL club. So from there on the shirts said we were an INTERNATIONAL Truck Club ! people have joined from Australia, Europe and Egypt ...
Which brings us to the key event, after a couple years Kid and I sat down and said do you think if we had a National Club meeting ANYBODY would show up? We were not really sure, But amazingly it happened, we all met and knew each other from so much chatter on the site. People brought nicer trucks than I have ever seen before, stock trucks, unibodies. People were offering to share gifts as awards for the next Slickstock before the first one was over ! I will always be glad my Dad and Mom made it to that first show to see it happen. It has just kept pulling in new guys with tons of energy and ideas, and us older guys sit back and smile wondering how did it happen..
The Slick Name finally came about this way.
... I got SO TIRED of telling people what kind of truck we were into..
After awhile saying " 61-66 Ford F-series trucks" got OLD. And try it with a person..they get this blank stare like they are going into a coma !
So, after hearing some older trucks being called EFFIES, and FAT FENDERS .. I just decided..Like it or not..we will come up with our own nickname...
So I posted the idea to badge our trucks with a nickname on the board , and as I worked in the garage I thought the older 60 style was so big and block shaped, and the 67 on were much sharper edged ,our trucks were slicker, a more melted flowing design than the ones before, or after them.. So, I posted on the board, what if we call the truck club Slick 60's to cover our body style..I couldn't decide whether to spell out the Sixty, or use the numbers 60.. another member said "Use the number for sure !" so that is how we went that way.
At the time the product SLICK 50 was advertising a lot so it sounded similar,I had used that product with good results in my old van. So that made it sound OK to me.. that is how it happened..
Also around that time we had some members with 57-60 models and they were complaining " Hey ! what about us?" "We need a name for our trucks" Someone came up with FRIDGES around that time,
I have NO IDEA who,or if they were a member of our club.. but you want to talk about a PERFECT name for them ! It reminds me so much of those big broad fridges.. perfect...
First of all I do not remember life before my pops 66 F100. that is because he bought it when I was three or four years old. He had spotted it at an old gas station for sale. Apparently a farmer had a bad year and the fuel company repossessed it and sold it to my Dad.
I don't recall what he payed for it but when he bought it 50 some years ago my Moms now famous quote was
"Carl, we will NEVER get our money out of that truck."
Well as it sits now it still has the same motor in it, it runs and drives...and that truck has been used hard.
I can't even begin to tell you the history of that truck, but it has been used as a business truck to pull trailer loads of bailed paper, scrap steel, It even once pulled a 40 plus foot long mobile home
under the cover of darkness down to our lake lot at Lake Red Rock. It was our camper, our boat hauler, it did everything we ever asked it to..
I learned to drive in it at age 14, and it would have been my first car if it wasn't for the gas crunch of the late 70's
I always loved the truck, it was loud and tough.. as a kid I would sit with the JC Whitney catalog and make lists of all the garish chrome aftermarket parts I could find ! hahaha
Dad and Mom moved out to a farm after I had left home, and eventually I bought a house and then a 64 with possibilities. I learned a lot about mechanics, auto body and painting on that truck.. But I never forgot about Dads 66.
Now most of you know that we slick owners are few and far between. I don't recall knowing anyone other than my Dad that really loved them. I always felt I was the LAST guy that loved them. So imagine my surprise one day when I went to a car show (which I seldom do) and there amongst the 100,000 dollar customs is an old faded 64 long box. I mean it was right out of some alley or field, it even had a dent where a tree had grown up and bent the fender.. I decided right then and there, I gotta meet the guy that had the nerve to drive this in here. So I asked some people nearby if it belonged to them, they said
"No, but he is with us and will be right back"
So I hung around long enough to meet Kid, we hit it off right away,Next thing you know we are hanging out at his garage where he is just waiting for a small push to start working. I show him my 64 which has sort of turned into a project of insanity, I started taking it apart and couldn't quit until it was ALL apart, then I was pretty anal about it being anything other than the best I could make it on my own..
So Kid starts working on his truck, and buying more trucks, then I bought more trucks, then we had trucks stashed all over the place, We even made parts runs to Texas, everywhere it just starts exploding... we started stopping and saying hi to anyone in a Slick we would see...Anything in the paper was a must go visit, we knew all the trucks in the local junkyards.
One day I am online and I see this EXCITE site has FREE CLUBS, I sort of looked at it, and doubting it was really free I started playing with their options, next thing I know I had picked a picture, and called it (61 to 66 Ford F-series pickups). I had to make up a user name, and on all the Aquarium boards I had been using FOODSTICK ,which is a fish food I used in my tanks.. So ah, I just used it here as well.
At this time neither kid or I were very internet savvy ...we looked at stuff, but didn't really add to it much. I sent him the address to the club, and thought I would let him in on the joke. The funny thing was I had just been at his house, and I was making posts about how I was just at this ( friends house), and told him what I had just done AT HIS HOUSE! it was a way to sort of laugh at ourselves. kid joins up and plays along, after a few days we had some posts stacked up, and I sort of figured we would get tired of it. I guess it was like we had built a new tree house and eventually forget about it.
Days later however I am talking to Kid and he says
" Are you making up new names and joining, and posting on the site"
I can still recall being confused, thinking he was joking, and then nearly choking when I realized SOMEBODY THOUGHT THE CLUB WAS REAL ! I actually was scared about misleading people and thought about erasing it before people realized it was just two guys joking around. I nervously went to the site, and there are some new names, friendly people saying ..
"Can I join? "I thought I was the only person that liked these trucks"
We weren't alone! There were people just like Kid and I ... so people start trickling in, Kid and I start searching the web for Slick owners.. there couldn't have been more than 20 pictures of Slicks on the entire web, we would send emails and invites anytime we found someones email address. We kept hearing
"I thought I was alone!" and "This truck has been in my family 30-40 years" " It was my Dads, Grampas ,or Uncles"
At first a few people thought Kid was " My KID!) hahahah we soon had that straightened away, and before long we had many Son's and Fathers involved.
I was getting very touching emails from peoples parents
"Thank you for being so nice to my son about his truck, he is only 14 and he has never shown so much interest in anything before , he loves the club"
Another of our members with some difficult health issues once told us
"I had no desire and interest in much of anything anymore.. but for the first time in a long time I am up in the morning with something I WANT to work on, and I feel like I have friends out there, and I am making friends right here"
I even had one young man write me and ask me ..
"Can you please remove that cussing someone posted , My parents will not let me visit the board if they think it has profanity on it"
At times it was nothing short of humbling.
There are so many stories of really interesting owners and trucks, and there have been some really stressful times when people have misunderstood what we were trying to do, and decided they wanted to blow off steam at someone. At times people have gotten mad over censored posts, or Brand X conflicts. We have always tried to make it friendly, Kid and I figure there are a BILLION places on the net to fight ,troll, and yell. Why not keep this a place to chat with friends about trucks.
Its real easy to go from teasing among friends to mistaking sarcasm or a joke with an intended insult. I suppose that will always be a problem. The emoticon smileys do help if used to show humor...
Back to the story, the momentum just builds and builds, at one point on Excite or Yahoo clubs we ranked number one for active posts in the club section ! People would accidentally check the ... EMAIL ME ALL POSTS option...when they signed up, they would get hundreds of emails in a couple days !!! I think we were near half a million page views by the second year, Everyone on the board joked ..
"Half of them are mine !"
Now Kid is really into the car club thing, and he would mention to me how much he always wanted to be in a real club that was like our online club. I was hesitant, I mean we really had gathered a big active crowd, I wasn't sure what was going to happen. From the start we had kept the money out of the club, no dues, just contribute your time and enthusiasm. I was afraid money could mess it all up, and Kid agreed.
I was in the t-shirt business,and the day came when I said to Kid
"Do you want to make this more REAL, and sell some T-shirts to the guys that are interested?"
Well as I have described it before, Kid was like a dog let off a leash, I mean he was off and there was no turning back. it wasn't long and we were handing out homemade club cards, we really started trying to find people, and we were finding them nearly as fast as they were finding us.
The t-shirts idea took off on the board, guys out of state said
"Can it be National ? I want one!",
So we ran the first batch as a National club, it was sort of a inside joke to all of us. Suddenly guys from Canada say what about us? Could it be INTERNATIONAL? We sort of figured sure that was even funnier than it being a NATIONAL club. So from there on the shirts said we were an INTERNATIONAL Truck Club ! people have joined from Australia, Europe and Egypt ...
Which brings us to the key event, after a couple years Kid and I sat down and said do you think if we had a National Club meeting ANYBODY would show up? We were not really sure, But amazingly it happened, we all met and knew each other from so much chatter on the site. People brought nicer trucks than I have ever seen before, stock trucks, unibodies. People were offering to share gifts as awards for the next Slickstock before the first one was over ! I will always be glad my Dad and Mom made it to that first show to see it happen. It has just kept pulling in new guys with tons of energy and ideas, and us older guys sit back and smile wondering how did it happen..
The Slick Name finally came about this way.
... I got SO TIRED of telling people what kind of truck we were into..
After awhile saying " 61-66 Ford F-series trucks" got OLD. And try it with a person..they get this blank stare like they are going into a coma !
So, after hearing some older trucks being called EFFIES, and FAT FENDERS .. I just decided..Like it or not..we will come up with our own nickname...
So I posted the idea to badge our trucks with a nickname on the board , and as I worked in the garage I thought the older 60 style was so big and block shaped, and the 67 on were much sharper edged ,our trucks were slicker, a more melted flowing design than the ones before, or after them.. So, I posted on the board, what if we call the truck club Slick 60's to cover our body style..I couldn't decide whether to spell out the Sixty, or use the numbers 60.. another member said "Use the number for sure !" so that is how we went that way.
At the time the product SLICK 50 was advertising a lot so it sounded similar,I had used that product with good results in my old van. So that made it sound OK to me.. that is how it happened..
Also around that time we had some members with 57-60 models and they were complaining " Hey ! what about us?" "We need a name for our trucks" Someone came up with FRIDGES around that time,
I have NO IDEA who,or if they were a member of our club.. but you want to talk about a PERFECT name for them ! It reminds me so much of those big broad fridges.. perfect...