Sorry for the prolonged absence.  The last few months have been a tad rough here.  We were just making some great progress on the garage in July and August - we had an electrical contractor come in to help me (I wanted to speed things up because my eldest son, Samuel was coming home to live with Susan and I while he attends school) and the contractor had roughed out all of my electrical plans.  We also installed a fence, a walkway to the garage from the deck/house, and we managed to do all of this even though I was still dealing with pain on a daily basis.

All of a sudden, on September 16, the painkillers no longer helped with the pain.  I knew something was drastically wrong and I asked Susan to take me in to the E.R.  They confirmed that I had a bad appendix and said they could remove it laparoscopically.  No big deal.  I would be out in a day. Things took a serious downturn from there.  The "bad" appendix had actually already burst, so after the laporoscopic procedure, they had to open everything up for surgery.  I was OK for a very short while after that, except the healing process didn't seem to be going right... I developed some severe complications, they had to go in again, and for a week I was in an induced coma.  Things were not looking good for a while, and believe it or not, I think the whole process was a lot harder on my Susan than it was on me.  Somehow I lost a month.

I'm home now and slowly recovering.  I lost a lot of weight (a good thing, but I wouldn't write a book about it!) and can't get around very well yet. It's a struggle just to walk, and it's going to take the entire winter, a lot of work and a lot of exercise just to get my movement and conditioning back.

I apologize if I've missed any of your notes, but I think I've caught up with everyone at this point.  Needless to say, work on Cornelia is likely put off until Spring.  Nonetheless, check back in because I will still post news and stories about IHC trucks and events as I come across them, and I'm also back at work at OldIHC (a big thank you to Jim Hadfield for coming out of retirement and holding the fort at OldIHC in my absence!). ~ John

For those of you that do not get Vintage Truck Magazine, there was a WONDERFUL article by B. Mitchell Carlson providing a brief history of the International Harvester truck logo over the years.

I took a little time out and reproduced it, word for word, for your benefit as part of the IHC history documentation here.  Be sure to check it out as it is a very interesting read.

I wish I could be providing you with an update on Cornelia, but the fact is that we've actually LOST money from the truck fund instead of gained, so work on the truck is getting put off.  I still hope to spend some time on the truck later on this summer, but the higher priority will be completing the garage since my son will be coming down to live with us starting in August and I need to make room for him by getting tools out of the basement and into the garage :-)

In other news, Jim Hadfield, the (former) owner of OldIHC has retired and I have now taken over the site.  THAT has kept me plenty busy as well.  A GOOD busy though, as it is a great bunch of guys, and I consider it the BEST resource on the Internet for old International trucks!  Be sure to sign up as a member and avail yourself to the forums - the people there will surely help you out no matter how obscure you think your difficulty is!

Finally, I am VERY happy to report that through OldIHC and Classic Truck Posters, we have raised over $1,700 for Matt's Truck!  Even though we've surpassed the original goal of $700 (which was only to get the truck paid off and get it home) let's continue to help them out and make Matt's world a brighter one!  You can find out how to donate HERE.

While we haven't had the best luck raising funds for our own project lately, I'm proud to say that we HAVE had wonderful success in helping to raise funds for Matt and his family over the past month.

We started a funding campaign at OldIHC and at Classic Truck Posters, and managed to raise almost $800.00 in just the past four weeks, which will allow Matt's family to finish paying off the truck for Matt, get it home and start working on it for him - a very wonderful thing :-)

We're going to keep the fundraiser going for a while yet since the contributions are still coming in at a steady pace.  A purchase of the special poster we made for Matt (pictured to the right) will also see a contribution go to the family as well.

Susan and I, as well as Matt's family, are all overwhelmed by the generosity we've seen.

I get a LOT of email through this site - and it's great.  Questions about oil filters, letters about fellow enthusiasts and their truck stories... I love reading each end every one of them and I love helping out when I can too.  Every once in a while you get a letter that is something truly special, however, and I wanted to share this one from Mark (reprinted word for word) about his son Matt and his "new" truck:

I've been driving Petes, KW, Macks etc. for my Boss who owns a construction co.  But I just bought my handicapped kid an old 1960 IH Single axle dumptruck, I found laying in a field. Even if my kid Matthew is 26 yrs old, he only has mind of bout a 7 yr old.

You would think this kid hit the lottery "his own real dump truck"  What your gona see as junk...it's pure Gold in this kids eyes, even though he knows he cant drive it,

But, soon as I get the $700 left owed on it? Then I'll just pray I get it restored before Matt passes on. He has many other health issues. He's a Truck boy since the day he was born! NASCAR second lol. And Im a proud Dad sending you this pic to post. Hope none make fun of it, but I wont let the kid see anything bad. What a blessing for his mother and I, to see the smiles and joy, we've been seeing ever since we showed t to him out in that field!

Thank you for letting us share this wonderful time in our lives,

God Bless,

Mark

Mark and Matt - I don't see junk here at all - I too see pure gold.

Just a quick note to let you know that we'll be removing the posters from this site over the next few days.  Why?  Two reasons - the first and foremost is because I don't want Restoring Cornelia to become a "Commercial" site.  It's about the truck and our adventures in bringing this beautiful International back to glory.

Second, the posters are still VERY important because they will help fund the build, but we have created an entirely new venture for them called "Classic Truck Posters" (check it out when you get a chance!).  Internationals, of course, make up the bulk of the inventory, but we've added Fords, Chevys and will be adding more makes and models as we go along.  Susan is SO amazingly talented, and we feel we can make a go of this and hopefully make some supplemental income to support bringing Cornelia to life!

I'll continue to sell parts because they are directly truck related and also help others who are restoring their trucks.

In the meantime, I've also been in contact with Steve Schmidt of Midnight Hot Rods and plan to schedule a trip to their new shop in Milwaukee soon.  I'll be sure to get some photos of the trip and post about it when we do!

When you're poor and you have an expensive (relatively expensive to us, anyway) build to save up for, you have to come up with creative ways of budgeting and saving.  As you've seen, I've been selling parts from Cornelia's drive train as I've been removing them, and I'll continue to do so, but we've come up with another way to raise a little money for the build - one that can benefit the beauty and decor of your home (and/or garage) as well!

Thanks to Susan's graphic talents, we've come up with a series of tongue-in-cheek racing (yes, RACING!) posters for our classic International trucks!  Now as we all know, these were sold as farm trucks, and most of them struggled to gain speeds of 45 to 65 miles per hour (even downhill...), so we thought it would be fun to create a series of posters that put these same trucks in vintage racing poster settings, and if I must say so myself, they turned out beautiful!  Best of all, we can offer them at an excellent price.

And here's something even more special... If you send us a high-resolution photo of your truck, we'll (OK, Susan will...) develop a custom poster just for YOU, with YOUR truck featured in one of the racing backgrounds of your choice!  You simply cannot find this anywhere else.