He was honest, hard working and ran a really great operation. A man to be admired.

Whether building a stock tank or pushing and piling brush, he could get it done. He had really great operators working for him.

As much as I remember watching and looking up to him (even though you had to be fairly short to actually look up “to” him) there was one peculiar thing that I most remember. He always hauled his dozers around on a float type trailer (that’s a trailer that the bed is approximately 5′ off the ground) instead of a lowboy with a bed height of 3′ or 3 1/2′. Now that wasn’t all that uncommon in the 60’s. We did the same thing, under the direction of Cecil Lewis.

But Harold did one other thing. He traveled down the highway with the dozer blade in the raised position. With the weight already somewhat top heavy being that far off the ground, raising the blade even made it more so. Or to me that’s the way it appeared. He reasoning, with the blade being wider than the trailer, the blade would be about roof high in the down position but would be well above most vehicles if left up. Therefore it was safer.

Oh, there’s one more thing. He never chained them down. He walked the dozer on, winched the trailer up onto the back of the truck and took off. He wasn’t being careless but to him it was sensible to not tie the machine on because if he got on leaning enough ground that the dozer was going to fall off, the truck needed to be as far away from it as possible.

I never remember him losing a load. But I bet he would never get the Texas DPS License & Weight folks to go along with that logic now-a-days.

Below is an oilfield float trailer similar to what I’m talking about.

The next picture is a dozer like he used.