Predicate Pickup
The Old Days and When I Was A Boy are joined by an intransitive linking verb and are therefore predicate nominative. The Old Days were When I Was A Boy. They are one and the same, there is no difference.
Captain’s Table in St. Andrews was Windham’s Fish Market and the ice plant stood next door where the parking lot is today. They made 300 pound blocks of ice and had an ice crusher.
My father was a daily customer in the mid- and late-1940s, ice for our fish house. We bought crushed until we got our own crusher, then we ordered blocks. It iced down our fish in hundred-pound crates for hauling to customers in our trucks. Perfect for the purpose, never was there more delicious, crystal clear ice to chip off a bit to suck on a summer day, and for ice water and iced tea. Eventually we got our own ice machine and stopped buying ice.
Until I was fourteen and allowed to drive The Pontiac round the corner to get the ice, the ice plant would deliver our ice in the truck of my dreams: a 1948 Ford F1 pickup. It may have been red.
In The Old Days, to the extent I dared press my father, I begged him to get a pickup. But his many truck purchases were always large business trucks, Chevrolets from Bubber Nelson and Dodges from Karl Wiselogel, for hauling seafood to customers: fish markets and grocery stores in south Alabama and south Georgia. Instead of the pickup for which I lusted, he bought a 1936 Pontiac business coupe, removed the trunk lid, and installed a flat wooden deck in the trunk. It worked and I first drove it at age twelve and thirteen, but not alone until fourteen.
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