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This is the fifth chapter of a Seven Part Series.

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The potato business is a hard one to make a go of in Fort Stockton.  It certainly was in 1955, anyway.  The soil is hard and unforgiving.  Russet and his wife Julienne had tried to make it work, despite the forewarnings of just about everyone in town.  But they were northerners and they had a stubborn streak that was as hard to break as Russet’s habit of chewing his fingernails after coupling.  He hadn’t figured out that Julienne’s negative reaction to the unsanitary habit was one of the reasons the frequency of those couplings had diminished, despite the youthful vigor they both still possessed.

The bank was bearing down on them for payment for last year’s farm loan when Russet got word that his maternal grandfather had passed, back home in Scranton, and had left him the 1952 GMC 250 Dually Delivery Truck.  Julienne was becoming more adamant that it was time to start a family, and Poor Richard’s Almanac was predicting poor weather for growing crops in Southwest Texas.  The confluence of these events made it clear that it was time for Russet to shift gears and get out of the spud game.

“This is the sign I’ve been waiting for,” he explained to his wife over hash browns one morning.  “I’m tired of toiling in the fields, scraping the hard dirt of this wretched region, trying to coax out enough tubers to make ends meet.  We’re getting into the banana business.”

“You don’t know a damn thing about growing bananas!” Julienne noted.  “Even less than you know about potatoes.”

“Exactly!” Russet noted.  “That’s the beauty of the whole thing.  I wouldn’t be the one growing the crops.  I would only be the middleman.  The wholesaler.  I take the truck I inherited down to Mexico once or twice a week.  Fill it full of bananas that someone else has planted, watered, and harvested.  Bring them back up to Fort Stockton and the surrounding towns and sell them for a profit.  Shift all the hard work and risk to our friends to the south.  Focus on the sales end of it up here.  Low risk, high reward!”

Julienne had to admit, she found the idea appealing.

In the weeks that followed, Russet took the Lone Star Flier to Scranton to pick up the GMC truck and drive it back to Texas.  Julienne busied herself learning all she could about bananas at the Fort Stockton Public Library, getting the loans extended at Prairie View State Bank, and brushing up on her Spanish.  She hadn’t spoken a word of it since high school.  Before leaving Scranton, Russet performed  work on the truck including rebuilds of the carburetor, water pump, and generator, rewiring of the electrical system, refinishing the wheels, repair of the canvas roof, and replacement of the filters, wheel bearings, tires, and trim and brake components. By the time Russet rolled back into town the truck was looking like new.  Braking was handled by four-wheel drums, and the system was serviced with a replacement master cylinder, lines and fittings, hardware, wheel cylinders, and all wheel bearings.

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Russet called Julienne before he left Pennsylvania and told her to extend the loans a little further based on what he’d spent to refurbish the “free” inherited truck.  Interior updates included replacement of the ignition and glovebox hardware. Instrumentation included a 90-mph speedometer and a multi-function gauge for fuel level, amperes, temperature, and oil pressure. The five-digit odometer showed 70k miles, but total mileage was unknown when he crawled into the truck for the trip back to Texas.

Back at home, Julienne was becoming an expert on everything having to do with bananas.  She learned they were not grown on trees, but were actually an herb.  She discovered that they floated in water, perhaps because bananas themselves are 75% water.  When she found out that bananas actually contain the mood booster serotonin, she started work on a marketing campaign for the product based on getting happy by just eating it.  Nobody had ever considered getting happy in Fort Stockton before, much less by simply eating a banana.  (Not including, of course, Shannon Hudspeth, who was known to have discovered that early on.)

Julienne’s research showed that bananas were the third most popular fruit in America.  She had to admit that Russet had been on to something.  When he pulled into the driveway of the farm and drove the yellow and green GMC up the gravel road to the farmhouse, she rushed out the door and greeted him with a kiss that contained far more tongue than he was expecting.  It took his breath away.  Well, it actually gagged him just slightly.  Thirty minutes later, he was clipping his fingernails while Julienne went downstairs to look the truck over.

Julienne had learned in all of her research that bananas are rich in Potassium (Potassium-40), which is a radioactive isotope of Potassium.  This actually makes them slightly radioactive.  Eating a banana exposes the person eating it to about 0.1 microsieverts of radiation.  She feared that Russet spending so much time around so many bunches of the fruit would complicate his ability to father a child, something they both were looking forward to.  In the end, she concluded the risk to fertility posed by the radiation exposure would be far less than his fingernail-clipping habit.  She climbed up into the cab of the truck and thought about their future in terms brighter than she’d thought of it in a long, long time.

The couple initially made the trips together down into Mexico to pick up the weekly loads of fresh product and bring it back up to Southwest Texas to resell.  But by 1957 the business had grown to the point that they could no longer both be gone for such long periods of time.  Russet began making the trips south by himself when they became twice-a-week journeys.  Rising profits allowed them to pay off all the past due loans from the potato operation.  In fact, business was such that in late 1957 Russet and Julienne went down to Frontier Ford, “Home of the Straight Shootin’ Deal,” and bought a brand new Ford Ranchero for Julienne to drive when Russet was making the trips south.

Rodger got them into a 1957 Ford Ranchero finished in white and blue over blue vinyl upholstery and powered by a 292ci Y-block V8 paired with a three-speed automatic transmission. Equipment included a front-hinged hood, fender-mounted side mirrors, a white tonneau cover, power steering, and air conditioning.  Russet pulled Rodger over to the side and slipped him a $50 when Juliette had excused herself to go to the Lady’s Room.  “Put a pair of fender skirts on that thing.  I want it really gussied up for Julienne.  It’ll be kind of a surprise when we come back to pick it up!”

Rodger marveled at Russet’s ability to make a woman swoon.

When the couple came back from having lunch at the Dairy Twin while the dealership washed the car and got it filled up with gas, Julienne couldn’t believe her eyes when she saw the Ranchero parked out front.  “They don’t call you the Banana King for nothing!” she shrieked as she threw her arms around his neck and squeezed him tight.  Twenty minutes after they got back to the farm, Russet was clipping his fingernails and Julienne was back down on the gravel driveway slowly running her fingers over the front-hinged hood, fender-mounted side mirrors, and white tonneau cover of her new Ranchero.

She looked into the cabin through the driver’s window and noted the three-spoke steering wheel fronting a 120-mph speedometer and gauges for fuel level and coolant temperature. There was nothing that could have measured her temperature when she directed her gaze to those fender skirts on the aft end of the car based truck.

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