In 2013 I was renting a room in Bakersfield while working at Occidental Petroleum. We got an email from Natasha Rigg letting us know that Bob Tusso, who had bought the truck from us in 2004 when we moved to Austin Texas, was selling the truck. After discussing it with Bernadett we got excited and called Bob to let him know we wanted to buy her back. So we drove to Flagstaff and towed her back with the grey Tacoma. She would not run, we tried to get her going but without any luck. She had been neglected and to some extent abused and it was clear that she needed a lot of work. I couldn’t see a way of getting her up and running and restoring her true spirit without a complete makeover. So, we began to disassemble her in Gloria’s garage but only made it so far before the project sat idle in a couple of different garages over the years. The enormity of the project, fear of finding parts and perceived expense kept me from working on the project in ernest. It was hard seeing the truck partially disassembled but I still couldn’t let her go. Finally in 2021 we began to disassemble her with stern determination to restore the truck to true form.
