A man, a guitar, and his quest to find a lost 1958 Chevy pickup truck

OK, this is a sad one, folks. Get your hankies ready.

You know that sad, old country song (basically, all of them) about the guy missing his woman, his dog, and his pickup truck?

Well, Dave Barton of Franklin, Kentucky, is that guy, except for the part about the woman and the dog.

It’s only a pickup truck, but Barton’s blue eyes are crying in the rain. And it’s not just a song for him, it’s real life, the story of love and loss that left his heart as empty as a church on Monday morning. Now he's on a quest to find that long lost love.

Moved to Nashville, bought a truck

Barton, 80, is retired now from the country music business in Nashville, where he had moved in 1964.

“I played the (Grand Ole) Opry about eight years,” Barton recalled. “I was on the road with Jim Ed Brown and the Browns.”

Jim Ed Brown and the Browns. That’s a real thing. You can look it up on Google. Barton toured with him in the late 1960s.

Anyway, Barton was a booking agent and music publisher most of his professional life, but he played, too, and still does, a bit, although he’s shifted into bluegrass. 

In the early 1960s, though, he was into the rock and roll. He played a 1953 Stratocaster in a rock band called the Night Beats. You can find that one on Google, too, but it’s the wrong band, a psychedelic garage band. Barton’s band was an early Beatles cover band.

“We had Beatle wigs, Beatle-looking jackets, and we did all that cover stuff, like ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’” he said.

They wound up playing gigs all over the country.

That included places like the Piccadilly in Green Bay, so he came here a lot back in the day, came to know the city well, and even met and eventually married a woman from here.

“I quit the band, because I didn’t think screaming and hollering and shaking my ass at age 35 was the place I wanted to be,” he said. “We moved to Nashville because I wanted to be in the country music business.”

That’s where Barton bought the pickup truck, a beautiful old 1958 Chevrolet, for $1,750 from a guy from Arkansas. It was the 1970s, so the truck was already old, getting long in the grill.

But it was a pretty little thing, with two pairs of headlights and a wrap-around back window, something he thought he could love until the sun doesn’t shine and until the last moon is rising.

“Most of those old trucks had the old flathead six, but somebody had put a V8 327 in it before I got it,” Barton said.

He stuck another $5,000 into it in a restoration project that took five years to finish.

“I had the bumpers all chromed, and the headlights. We had mag wheels, we replaced the radio and the spare tire on the side, and the wood bed with the cover. It was IROC blue, like an IROC Camaro — a real, pretty blue color.”

'I'd love to find that damn thing'

But in the end, he must have been wishing on someone else’s star.

After driving it for a few years, he gave it to his son, Derrick, who stenciled his name on a side window and used it to commute to school.

“It got something like 8 miles per gallon, really sucked gasoline, so when he went to college I bought him something else.”

Then came the moment that turned his world around and left him lookin’ for a place to fall apart. For some reason he can’t seem to justify, he’s bewildered as to how it all came down, but he ended up selling the truck to a buddy from Green Bay. He put it out like the burnin’ end of a midnight cigarette. He got $3,500, but somewhere far away, a lonely bell was ringin’ and it echoed through the canyon like the disappearin’ dreams of yesterday.

The buddy owned it for some years and then, 15 or 20 years ago — “I don’t know, time flies,” Barton said — the buddy sold it off to someone. The buddy has long since passed, and Barton lost track of the truck he left behind.

“I’d love to find that damn thing and bring it back down here,” he said. “My son’s 43 and would love to get it back and try to restore it and give it to my grandson.”

A three-generation Chevy pickup truck. What could be better? But yesterday is dead and gone, and tomorrow is out of sight.

Barton heard it was owned for a time by a police officer in Green Bay. He thought he spotted it in a parking lot about 10 years ago, when he was at his mother-in-law’s funeral in Green Bay, and it appeared to be disabled. His boy's name was still stenciled on the window.

Barton is kicking himself for a tragic loss that was bigger than the strength he had to get up on his knees.

We checked with the Green Bay Police Department on the outside chance somebody would remember a police officer owning a vintage pickup truck. No dice.

A call to Smitty’s Auto Salvage came up empty, too.

“I don’t remember ever seeing anything like that, and I’ve been here 30 years,” said the woman who answered the phone there.

“I suppose it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack,” Barton said. “But I’d really like to find it. I do have an attachment to it. It’d probably cost more than it’s worth, but I’d really like to find it.”

So, how about it, Green Bay? Anybody know anything about a blue 1958 Chevy pickup truck that may or may not have the name Derrick Barton stenciled on a side window? Can you help Barton make it through the night? Contact psrubas@gannett.com and we’ll hook Barton back up with somethin’ he’d lost somewhere somehow along the way.

(Contributors, in order of appearance: Willie Nelson: "Blue Eyes Cryin' In The Rain"; Alan Jackson: "Monday Morning Church"; Restless Heart: "I'll Still Be Loving You"; Bryan White: "Someone Else's Star"; Merle Haggard: "A Place To Fall Apart"; Brad Paisley: "Whiskey Lullabye"; Kris Kristofferson: "Sunday Morning Coming Down" and "Help Me Make It Through The Night.")