SUMMERS COUNTY W.Va. (Hinton News) – I have shown the original concept sketch my grandfather, Bernard Thompson, drew for our Travlin Hillbillies truck. He and his father then built the truck in 1967. It was in its first parade in the Alderson 4th of July celebration in 1968. It was an instant hit, became wildly popular, and led to having it in parades, car shows and festivals across West Virginia and parts of Virginia for the past 58 years.
Granddad always threw corncobs during the local parades and had a “slop jar” hanging from the bed of the truck. We all know what that was in reference to without me having to go into more context, haha.
Mom had always told me of an idea he had after he built it, of having a trailer to pull behind the truck. On the trailer was an outhouse, and in the outhouse, he would have someone riding with the door open during the parade and reading a “newspaper.” And then occasionally, during the parade route, the man sitting in the outhouse would drop a corncob through a hole in the floor of the trailer.
We have spent the last 7 years going through granddads things since he passed away in 2018. He is where I got my “collecting” from. Yeah, we will just call it collecting, ha! In going through his contents, I found hundreds and hundreds of antique automotive magazines and literature. We can’t keep everything, we have kept all of the local pieces and the best of the best of his collection, but we had to part with some things.
I just listed this huge collection on Facebook last week, to which my good friend Danny Eggleston took them. He later messaged me a photo of the drawing you see here, and graciously gave it back to me for my collection. I thought I had gone through everything piece by piece, but somehow missed this treasure.
It is a drawing that granddad had done of the outhouse idea he had. We never knew he did this. It just goes along with what Danny always says, “History is never lost, only found!” So true in this case. One last thing about this drawing is that the person waving from the back is my mother, Cheryl Jones, when she was young. Or as she said, while I was writing this piece a very, very long time ago. Ha
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