Norris Arm student restores great-grandfather's classic truck, drives it to graduation
The exterior paint is new, and the engine has been completely rebuilt — the brakes were redone and the gas tank was moved.
The whole truck was stripped down to the axles. But the blue upholstery in the cab is original, just the same as it was in 1969 — save for a silver plaque engraved in the honour of the Dodge truck's original owner.
"Really, I built this truck more so in his memory than anything else," said Jake Hollett of Norris Arm, N.L., sitting on the truck's leather seats. "I think it's important just to show the main reason and the purpose behind the truck."
It reads "Lewis' Legacy," for Jake's great-grandfather.
Jake picked up the Dodge D200 truck behind the family garage, where it had been resting for what seemed like decades; the rusted frame had sunk deep into the mud, and trees were starting to grow through the machine.
It was a match.
"I just had the feeling that that was the truck I wanted to do," he said.
He was 13. It was his first repair job.
"I started with the idea that I was just going to fix the brakes and drive the truck as it was, because that's all the truck needed," he said. "Well, I put it in the garage and I started to tear the truck apart, and I just didn't stop until there was nothing left on the truck."
But just because he was ambitious — he inserted a Bluetooth adapter in a 49-year-old machine — doesn't mean it came easy.
"There's countless times I'd leave the garage and slam the door and say that I'd never touch the truck again, but I always ended up coming back down," he said. "I just couldn't quit."
Jake got by on lots of help: from his father, from friends or from Facebook — and, only occasionally, a thick red service manual.
Before any of this repair could happen, Jake had to get permission from a woman who knew the truck well: His great-grandmother, Elizabeth Purchase.
"He and his dad came, and I said, 'Youse must want something,' and they looked at me and laughed, and I said, 'Well, the two of youse are together, so must need something!" she recalled.
After a bit of prodding by his father, Jake asked for the truck, and Purchase said yes.
"He could have it with a heart and a half. I love this boy, and anything that I can give him or do for him, I will do it," she said.
Lewis Purchase died at 76, in 1998, two years before Jake was born — so the two never met.
But when Jake is working on the truck, it doesn't feel that way.
"When I sit in the truck, I just feel like he's here with me, sat beside me," he said. "Just doing the truck, it makes me feel like I have a connection to him that I wouldn't have had otherwise."
As word spread, so did the stories.
"I'd meet people and talk to people, especially at car shows. I'd tell them what I was doing and when they'd find out who originally owned the truck, then they'd start telling me stories of when they knew him."
"I've just always known and heard stories of my grandfather being such a nice man, such a polite man."
After all the tinkering, wrenching, painting and shining — Jake says it took exactly four years, to the very day — the Dodge camper truck was ready to ride.
And who better to share that ride with than Nan Purchase?
"I didn't know if I wanted to cry or where I wanted to laugh," she said. "It brought back a lot of memories, and when I went to put the seatbelt on I said, 'Oh my.'"
Elizabeth Purchase went on a lot of trips with her husband, Lewis, in that 1969 Dodge truck.
"Wherever he went, I went," she says.
So now, she says, Jake gets to make some of his own memories — and take on those that the truck will leave him.
"That he will get through the truck," she explained. "You know, when he sits in it and he knows that this is the truck that his great-grandfather drove."
"I think that he'll have good memories, because I had beautiful memories of the truck."
And what would Jake's great-grandfather think, if he could see it now?
"I think he'd be so proud that Jake got her and got her done up, because Lewis loved beautiful things," Purchase said.
Jake's side of that story is just a bit different.
"He'd probably want it back."
