Tim's Grubwagon

Summer 1976

“It’ll do,” I said to myself and to my Uncle Gene as we walked around the truck yet one more time.  It was a 22-year-old step van, the type used back then as a delivery truck.  It was painted dark brown, so maybe it had been a UPS truck.  I had been back in Ohio for just a couple of months and was beginning a new part of my life.  I would work hard and would have my family shaking their heads in exasperation, as I left behind a failed marriage and a teaching career that I had barely started.

I loved to cook and had learned at lot from watching Tommy prepare my lunches when I ate at his lunch counter in Cleveland Heights. I built a kitchen in the van while staying at my parents’ farm in southern Ohio, with old appliances and parts intended for campers, and using a lot of old wood from a barn my father was tearing down.  I installed a lift-up door and serving counter and had an artist friend paint some cute images and a big “Tim’s Grubwagon” with an Old West motif on the side.  I fixed it up mechanically, put on some new tires, and headed west with both optimism and just a little bit of trepidation.  The first trial run was in a Denver city park for a couple of days, and next a weekend in Telluride during the famous film festival.  I made vegetarian pizza, burritos, enchiladas, hummus and baba ganoosh wraps, salads, and sandwiches, with recipes largely inspired by Tommy.  In Telluride a former chef gave me a nice big knife and taught me how to use it to cut up vegetables quickly without loss of fingertips.

The next step was to travel to my new hometown.  I had to decide:  Eugene, Oregon, or Tucson, Arizona?  They both had big universities and reputations for being friendly to alternative (“hippie”) lifestyles.  I had contacts in both places.  Tucson it would be, as it was already September, and it would be a cold and wet winter in Eugene.

What had brought me to this time of my life, when I would abandon my home, my friends, and my profession to set out on what would appear to be such a risky and potentially lonely venture?  Obviously, I had reached a point where none of these things held me fast.  My really close friends had already moved away, gone either out west or to the East Coast for their own reasons.  My marriage had turned into a disappointment and had come to a fairly quiet and peaceful end.  My teaching career was to have been a way for us to have an overseas adventure, teaching in American schools in exotic places around the world after getting some experience in Ohio.  That dream was tossed overboard when I signed the divorce papers.  And home?  Well, Cleveland (where I had gone to school and then lived for a couple of years afterwards) felt like a place in which I no longer belonged.  And although the farm where I grew up was the one place that I always knew I could go back to if things didn’t work out, it wasn’t where I wanted to spend the rest of my life, much as I loved it and my family there.  With disappointments behind me, what drove me forward were both idealism and a need to prove something to myself.  A couple of years earlier, a friend had introduced me to the book Small Is Beautiful by E. F. Schumacher.  He was an economist who imagined an ideal world in which small cottage industry would be the predominant way of life.  I had spent the previous year looking around and thinking about what I could do to help create such a society (which surely was going to come to pass, when we ran out of oil), and came up with the idea of the grubwagon.

As I entered the outskirts of Tucson on Oracle Road, I looked at the mountains all around and at the city ahead. It was so different from anywhere I had ever lived before.  I felt an excitement and optimism like I had never felt before – or since, for that matter.  I felt like this was the place where I was finally going to make my mark in the world, to positive effect.

After finding a place to live (the very first day of arrival!), I needed to get a license to operate, which involved an inspection of the truck and a caution not to prepare food in my home.  The truck would be a licensed commercial kitchen, and I was good to go!

It took a few weeks of experimenting to figure out a good place to set up a lunch business.  I considered visiting construction sites, but didn’t know how to break in there.  What are all these workers going to go when a strange food truck just suddenly shows up?  I tried a street near the university, but the students mostly just walked by without showing much interest.  Then, I had pretty good luck setting up on the street downtown, near the courthouse.  It seemed that there were a lot of people wandering around looking for a place to eat, and they were attracted by the menu and prices.  Word got around, and business grew.  I hired one of my housemates to help me during the lunch rush.  Still, it was a hassle finding a consistent parking spot every day, and customers, who were mostly young lawyers and legal clerks and secretaries, joked about having to hunt me down.  I ended up renting a regular spot on the corner of a parking lot, owned by a local real estate “tycoon” who seemed to like me and gave me a good rate.

Business really took off after that, and during lunch rush there would be three us working hard to take orders and put the food out as fast as we could.  For a small income it was a huge amount of work, mostly because of the extensive menu and preparation that it required.  But we were happy, and I remember my friend John later saying that it was the best job he had ever had.  I made many friends, some of whom are still among my closest ones, including my amazing wife Theresa.

John and Liz, the other 2/3 of the crew.  She was important in two ways.  Not only eventually working for me, but prior to that, as a teenaged customer, advised me of a part-time job as a math teacher's aide at her "alternative" high school, for whom I became the de facto math teacher for 3 hours in the morning.  Then I would bicycle to the Grubwagon in time for the lunch rush, John having done the morning food prep.  Afterwards, I would be the one to take the grubwagon home and do the clean-up and advance prep for the next day.

So that is how I came to move to Tucson and to make a life there.  I didn’t keep the grubwagon going for very long.  After only a few months, as the hot desert summer approached, I realized that I wouldn’t be happy as a restaurateur the rest of my life, and I resolved to go to graduate school to study a lifelong interest of mine, meteorology.  And I discovered I could actually get paid for doing so!  An acquaintance bought the grubwagon business from me and tried to keep it going, but just didn’t have the knack for it.  He ended up defaulting on my loan to him and giving it back, and I later sold the truck to someone who wanted to take it back East to start a business in Knoxville.  I never heard how that worked out.  

After five years in graduate school, I left Tucson behind me, and with Theresa and my stepdaughter Stacy I headed to Huntsville for a job with NASA.  Our twin girls Vanessa and Allison were born shortly after arriving, and Huntsville would be our home for what may turn out to be the rest of my life.  The time I spent doing the grubwagon was only a year from start to finish, but that short road led to a “rest of the story” that I never would have predicted, not even in my wildest dreams.  To my children and grandchildren:  That, in a nutshell, is how the city of Tucson played a role in how you came to be!  I hope you get to spend some time there someday, experiencing the area’s unique beauty and culture, and remembering its importance in our family story.  Go to the Food Conspiracy on 4th Avenue where your mother (“Grammy”) used to work and where she and I met, and take a walk around the picturesque Old Courthouse downtown, listed in 1978 on the National Register of Historic Places.  The grubwagon parking spot is now covered by the modern Pima County Public Library.