My uncle, Bill Horsch, passed away last night. He had been ill for a long time, so it wasn’t unexpected... but these things are always sudden, sort of. I asked my dad how old he was, and he said “around 80, I think,” so we’ll go with that.
Bill was a long-haul truck driver for many, many years. He ran his own company; two of them, in fact: Rawhide Trucking, and later Horsch Trucking. He loved doing it, and kept on driving even after they made him take a desk job. I remember as late as the early 2000s, meeting up with him at a diner along Interstate 94 when I was living in St Paul and he was passing through.
He had a lot of trucks over the years, but the one I remember best was the big blue Peterbilt. He gave me a ride in it a few times when we were visiting him and my aunt Judy. The Peterbilt had a Cat engine, and my dad was an engineer at Cat, so the two of them would sit around the table and talk diesels while my mom’s and my Aunt Judy’s eyes glazed over. I sat there, listening, rapt.
But most important for our purposes here, as this is theoretically a site about cars, is that Bill taught me how to drive, at age 14, very much against my mom’s wishes. He wanted me to learn “right,” and not the way the high school driver’s ed teachers were going to do it. And that meant a stickshift. And in his fleet, that meant the Jeep.
The first lesson was perfunctory: he drove me out into a field behind their house, showed me which pedal did what, and told me “Drive ‘er back when you get the hang of it.” I probably stalled that Jeep about 300 times that afternoon, but in the end, I got it.
On later trips, I got to have some more fun with the Jeep; he let me drive it up Pike’s Peak when we were having a family reunion in Colorado. And he let my cousin and I tool around in it. On one memorable occasion, we were following (chasing?) some pretty girls in a Firebird down a dirt road; my cousin was driving, and showing off, sliding around, and stuck it in a ditch. (The girls never even doubled back to see if we were OK.) He was too nervous to drive it back, so I got us un-stuck (thank goodness for 4WD) and drove home, carefully and slowly, and then we washed the incriminating mud off the front bumper and grille, finishing just as Bill and Judy and my parents were returning from a trip to town. “Aw,” he said. “You warshed it too? You didn’t hafta do that.”
(Now the story can be told...)
I didn’t get to see Bill much in later years. He always seemed to be on the road when I visited my aunt Judy, or she visited without him, so we missed each other. But maybe that’s for the best; I didn’t have to watch him decline. I get to remember him at age fifty or so, in his overalls and Rawhide Trucking hat, puttering around the barn, or in the kitchen, up to his elbows in flour, making bsicuits from scratch, cracking jokes all the while. He was a genuinely good guy, the kind the world needs more of. And I’ll miss him.
So long, Uncle Bill. And thanks.