Sam Smith - One of the unfading influences in my life was serving as one of Wolfe's Neck Farm's first farm hands. Admittedly I only had three pigs to feed every day using some garbage I brought up to the big barn from my parent's house. I also had to bring large ice blocks kept under a big pile of sawdust back to the house to power the refrigerator because in the late 1940s and early 1950s we not only didn't have phone service, we didn't have electricity.
But the real payoff for me was that my father let his farm manager - James Mann - teach me by the age of 14 how to drive the army surplus personnel carrier with the front-end winch and A-frame. I was double-clutching and shifting into six-wheel drive and using a winch to haul things out of places long before I was able to drive legally on Maine roads beyond the farm. Jimmy Mann remains in my soul one of my best teachers.
As my brother Lewis later ecalled, "You couldn't go directly from one gear to another but had to go into neutral first, let the clutch all the way out and accelerate or brake the motor before shifting again, depending on the direction of the shift. The maneuver also required one to take into account the load on the truck, its speed and the grade of the road."
The six wheel drive Army surplus truck in which the author learned to drive
The truck was a marvelous machine that lasted for decades. It withstood all punishment including my father's attempt to launch a boat by towing it out on to the mudflats. The truck, of course, became deeply mired, but the winch eventually pulled the vehicle back to dry land.