After our second child was born, it became apparent that not all of us could ride in my standard cab pickup truck. There were times when we wanted to haul something with the whole family aboard, so I started looking at alternatives. A crew cab pickup would have solved the problem, but in 1980 there were no compact “shorty” crew cabs and I didn’t care for the idea of a 160-some inch wheelbase. However, Dodge had introduced the Club Cab model in 1973, and they were starting to appear on the used market.
After some searching in the media we had in the world before Craig’s List, I found a hot prospect in Rhode Island, about 50 miles from home. It was solid, if well used, and I made a deal on the spot and drove it home. The extra cab space was useful, for tools and other items as well as people, and there were desirable features like a tailgate that was easily removable. Jill named it Uriah, after Uriah Heep in Dickens’ David Copperfield (not the British rock band), because it was, well, a heap.
When I inspected it more carefully I found that Uriah was a “Camper 9000,” designed especially for slide-in camper units (although I didn’t have one). The number 9000 was Uriah’s GVW, achieved by putting one-ton brakes and springs on a 3/4-ton chassis, along with a package of camper-useful features. (Observant CarPorters will have noticed that his grille was the later 1974-76 style rather than that shown in the 1973 literature – I’m not sure why.) As it turned out, he needed brake work, no big deal, but I soon noticed that he didn’t accelerate worth a darn. Someone had replaced the original 360 engine with a 318 from a 1978 Dodge passenger car. That was okay because the 318 had a good reputation in truck circles, but in 1978 Chrysler Corporation had used an electronic spark advance. But there was no control unit on my truck, so Uriah was running permanently retarded. A junkyard distributor with vacuum advance fixed that problem. The only other malady occurred on a trip to Cape Cod when the electronic ignition module failed. As a result I bought a spare and always carried it with me, and of course I never had another failure.
Uriah’s principal shortcoming was that even with the “shorter” 149-inch wheelbase he didn’t have much traction when empty. Four years later I replaced him with a similar Dodge Club Cab, with four-wheel drive, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.
