Guess Who's Back: Henry the Truck

A Borego Valley original and his 1950 Ford are rejoining the Borrego Sun.

Guess who's back. After a few years off the page, Henry the Truck is returning to contribute to the Borrego Sun, and he is bringing his longtime driver, Denny DuVall, along for the ride.

If you were reading the Sun a decade ago, you remember Henry. He is not a person, though he tells a good story like one. Henry is a 1950 Ford panel truck, and for years his adventures ran in these pages in his own voice: part desert history, part tall tale, part lesson in how to drive a Model T.

Henry has earned the right to a few stories. Denny DuVall found him in Ocotillo Wells in 1960, run to death, his flathead six motor frozen solid. Denny paid thirty-five dollars for him and got to work. Over the years he rebuilt everything that makes Henry go, fitting him with a 350-horsepower GM crate motor, a Cadillac front clip, disc brakes, power steering, a tilt wheel, an aluminum radiator, a rebuilt Chevy transmission, and air conditioning. The old body he mostly left alone, its paint faded to a soft desert tan, because a truck that has seen this much ought to look like it. Henry has since carried Denny close to a million miles, from Borrego to Escondido to Julian and back, and he still turns heads everywhere he parks.

A truck who tells his own stories

What made Henry special in the Borrego Sun was the voice. The column read as if Henry himself were talking, looking out at the desert through a windshield that had seen it all. He wrote a eulogy for everything Denny lost in the 2002 Pines Fire. He walked readers through the three pedals of a Model T, one foot at a time. He traded memories of shaping the first nine holes at de Anza by hand in the summer heat. Readers wrote in to say how much they enjoyed it, and one remembered riding the bus to Julian for high school with a young Denny DuVall.

A family woven into Borego

The DuValls go back about as far as anyone in the valley. In December 1934, Glenn DuVall became Borego's postmaster. He and his brother, Edward "Eddie" DuVall, bought the valley's first store from Eslie Wynn, who had opened Borego's first post office back in 1928. By 1936, Eddie was running both the store and the mail. Around 1940 he added a garage and service station, and he kept the Borego Valley Store going well into the 1950s. Eddie's wife, Alta Jones DuVall, had come all the way from Vinalhaven, Maine, a schoolteacher who helped build the life of the young valley.

Denny grew up in that Borego, a native of the desert in the late 1940s and 1950s, and he has spent a lifetime gathering its stories. He put many of them in his book, "That's My Story and I'm Stickin' To It," a native's account of survival, characters, and everyday life in the old valley.

Part of the Sun again

So when Denny DuVall says he and Henry want to contribute to the Borrego Sun again, it is less a new start than a homecoming. A family that helped run the valley's first store and post office, and a truck that already told his stories in these pages, are coming back to the platform that has recorded Borrego since 1949.

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