Well, this truck used to belong to a guy named Bobby Stasio. He had the truck for awhile
then he decided to either put in or take out a Buick V6.
He spent his days fixing it just right. Every spare twenty dollars he earned he put right into this truck. He put a seven inch suspension lift on it, 35” Mud King radials, a Weber racing carburetor, then when his buddy rolled his red 83 truck Bobby put the un-butchered wiring harness into the pig. Bobby spent a lot of time getting every squeak, rattle, and vibration out of this truck and even painted it primer gray.
About this time, my brother Tom was preparing to get rid of his first 4WD Toyota due to a low end knock
and with the money he got from it and a horse trailer, he bought his second 4WD Toyota From Bobby. Bobby sold it to him for $3200 and it came with Smitybuilt nerf bars, rear bumpers double-double roll bar and front bumper. Also an extra set of mounted Mud King tires and a extra bench seat was thrown in the deal, along with any other Toyota parts Bobby didn’t want.
Tom mostly used it for a daily driver
going back and forth to work in Merced, and taking me to school with him his senior year. He wheeled it a couple of times but not much. we spent plenty of time down at our local ponding basin, where we taught ourselves the basics of four-wheeling.
We would drive threw the ruts and up and down the sides, also going across the sides, I would be so scared going sideways. Tom invited his friend Tony out there in his suburban
and he got high-centered as he crested one of the sides.
So Tom tried to pull an 8,000 lb suburban up that hill.
Needless to say, he had to reattach to the rear and pull him down. All that and with only one broken motor mount.
Tom kept saying how much he should paint it. he also kept saying that he liked it primer gray so finally I said to him why don’t you paint it yellow? He was like nah I don’t like yellow.
So I got on the computer and scaned a picture of his gray truck, then I proceeded to use my artistic ability to color it yellow. I showed it to him and he was like, wow that looks cool. So a few months later, Tom graduated high school. Then two weeks after that him and I were up at his friend Brack's relative's house for a graduation party. We woke up the next morning to shouting. There’s a fire over there!
so we all got up and ran outside. yep, a column of black smoke was rising over the dry grass hills
I jumped in Tom’s truck about the same time he did we shut the doors he put it in gear, and we hear, “can we come?” so we open the doors and two little kids crawl in,
one sits on my lap. ‘Bout that time somebody trying to turn around runs over a tractor implement, slicing their tire flat
but we’re not stopping. Tom pulls out the gravel driveway and hits second.
we go over the hill and around a tree, he was about to hit third when the driver side rear tire hit a bump which sent the rear end sliding 180 degrees, the passenger tires hit the grass and the truck lands on it’s roof
So back at the body shop they had cut off the roof and were getting ready to weld another one on off of a white truck when Bobby drives buy. He gets out and looks at it, starts yell’n
freakin' kids cussing out the closest person to him, which happened to be my dad.
About a week later the truck is done. Now it’s a gray truck with a white roof so instead of spending money, my brother spray paints it yellow, and about a week after that the engine blows. so I help tom pull it at my grandpa’s house then it turned out that the motor we put in, came from a company that recently went out of business, and that motor fails...
by this time tom is getting fed up with it and wants a truck with more power. He wants a Dodge.
He begs our mom for money, and being the kind woman she is, she gets my brother a loan for a 1996 extended cab 4x4 Ram. the catch was that my mom would get to keep the Toyota. Tom agrees thinking that she’d never have any use for it but ha ha! She did have a use for it.... her youngest son (ME) was approaching driving age. So guess what , since mom never planed on driving it, it had no value to her.
So she gave it to me.
AND THAT’S WHERE IT STARTS
