1951 Chevy 3100 – John J.

New Life for Daddy’s Nellie Belle

My daddy’s 1951 Chevrolet truck came from our farm in Georgia to our front yard in the historic neighborhood in downtown Sumter, South Carolina in the summer of 2011, rusted and full of acorns because the squirrels had made it their home.

Daddy bought this olive-drab green treasure from Southern Bell in the late 1950s where it had been used as a telephone truck. It still had the Southern Bell telephone symbol on the doors. Records show that it was made in Atlanta in 1951. He drove it back and forth to work at A&A Bakery in Athens, Georgia most days for years.

Daddy named her “Nellie Belle” probably because that was the name of Pat Brady’s Jeep on “The Roy Rogers Show,” which ran on television in the 1950s. He also used it as his farm truck. I recall Daddy riding through the pasture with salt for the cows on the back of Nellie Belle. I was always amused at how they would move so quickly to follow him.

I never did learn to drive her. It has “3 on the column” which always scared me. That probably is because Daddy never let me drive it back in the day when I was younger. He would say, “I don’t want you to strip the gears.” Some days, when I was a student at the University of Georgia, I would have to catch a ride home with Daddy feeling extremely embarrassed at my young, impressionable age to be seen in that old truck (1951 in 1966).

The last tag on Nellie Belle was in 1993. My daddy got sick in 1996 and lost his battle with cancer in June of 1997. Probably 15 years later, my husband and I talked about what we should do with the truck. My mother was living with us in South Carolina at the time, and we were selling my home place. Therefore, the truck had to be moved. It had been sitting under a shed in the pasture since my daddy passed away. We could take it back to Sumter.

John and I were not sure that was the right decision until John’s Presbyterian College buddy, John Harvey, talked him into bringing it to South Carolina. John Harvey had been up to Sanford from Washington, Georgia to help John get it out of the pasture and to the house. Since we were 250 miles away, my Uncle Bob (Daddy’s baby brother) helped get the truck running enough to get it to his house about 5 miles away. Bob had a history of tinkering with race cars and his friend J.R. helped him get the brakes operational, put a used gas tank in the truck, pumped up the tires, cleaned it out to include fixing the seat, and drove it to his house.

Not until 2011, did we make plans to rent a U-Haul trailer to bring Nellie Belle to Sumter. John and I set out on a five-hour trip towing the old rusty ’51. He had decided to bring it back to his old friends, Bubba Bailey and Jody Pruitt, who both had reputations for reworking a classic to good-looking condition. John had it painted Presbyterian College red with black fenders and added a Georgia Bulldog front tag. Shortly after it was running with its white wall tires, we decided to enter it in a car show down at Lake Marion and we have a trophy to prove it.

Unlike those days of the ‘60s, l love to ride with my husband around our town of Sumter since I could not possibly drive it myself. Everybody loves to see our “antique” and people almost always do a double take when we pass by.

Beth J.
May 11, 2019