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Pete Germini: Keep on Truckin’

They are quite a couple, Pete Germini and Maxine, but don’t get the wrong idea. Pete has been married to his wife Beverly for more than 60 years. Still, even Bev acknowledges the place that Maxine has in Pete’s life.

“His pride an joy,” she calls Maxine.

Now Maxine isn’t slim; in fact, she’s on the heavy side and boy can she kick up a racket. But then what else would you expect of a 15,000-pound, 1962 Mack dump truck, with 10 gears, two stick shifts, and two 30-gallon gas tanks? Despite Maxine’s model year, Pete is gallant about her age.

“She’s a young lady,” he says.

Just because Maxine’s big, don’t make the mistake of calling her clunky. Peter recalls the time a woman, who said she was an artist, stopped him in Chester to comment on the graceful, rounded lines of Maxine’s body.

“She’s a good girl,” Pete says, and there’s no question about what girl he is referring to.

Maxine was an easy choice for a name for the big, green immaculately kept truck.

“She’s a Mack truck,” Pete points out.

In fact, Pete likes to name all his vehicles: there’s Fawn, an appropriate name for a small John Deere bulldozer; and Patches, a pick-up that Pete says started out a Ford, but now has pieces of so many vehicles that Patches is not only a name but a description.

Whatever their original make, all Pete’s vehicles sport a Mack bulldog on the front hood.

“I just like Macks,” he says.

Pete bought Maxine some 25 years ago for $4,000. At that time the truck needed a lot of work, including a new transmission, new front wheels, and a new pilot bearing, a part of the gear shift assembly. These days, Pete brushes Maxine off daily and greases the dump truck mechanisms about once a month.

The truck looks pristine, but Pete points out there are some glitches. There’s the gas gauge: It doesn’t work, but using educated guesswork, Pete tries not to let the fuel level go lower than half. Then there’s the speedometer: It doesn’t work either; it had 200,000 miles on it when it stopped working and that was a while ago.

“Who knows now?” Pete asks.

The dashboard, Pete adds, does have some working dials: the air pressure and temperature gauges as well as the tachometer, which measures tire revolution.

Pete tries to keep Maxine’s speed at around 40 miles an hour; he doesn’t think she would go much more than 50. If that speed doesn’t get him where he needs to go on time, he has a solution.

“I just have to get up earlier,” he says.

In any case, he likes to keep his driving local, with Old Lyme and East Haddam defining the area where Maxine operates. Often, he says, once other drivers see Maxine, they give him a thumbs-up or a wave.

On a recent afternoon, with Maxine sparkling in the driveway, Pete gave a visitor a drive around the neighborhood. With a helping hand, the rider managed the high step into the cab. Pete admits that as he approaches his 80th birthday, it sometimes a little harder for him to climb that big step.

“It’s noisy,” Pete said as Maxine rumbled out of the driveway and onto Butter Jones Road.

There is no power steering; the air brakes wheeze as Maxine comes to a stop, but the ride was smooth, and Pete’s pride in his good girl evident.

Pete, a Chester native who was born less than a mile from where he now lives, worked for a number of years for Arthur W. Zanardi Construction Company. Since Arthur Zanardi, always known as Buddy, died, Pete has run his own excavation and site work business. He does a lot of hauling for Haynes, a construction and landscaping material firm with a location in Deep River and also works for private customers. His particular pleasure is when people call him for repeat work.

“It makes you feel good when that happens,” he says.

Pete remembers the Chester of his youth as a town with three or four gas stations, some five groceries, a barber shop and a bank that stayed open late on Friday nights so people could come in and cash paychecks. He worked in a grocery store and made deliveries to people whose doors were open whether or not they were home.

Today, Pete and Bev have two grown daughters, Susan Germini-Humble of Deep River and Debra Germini-Calimari of Chester, and four grandchildren. Debra is the longtime town clerk of Chester. She lives close to where Pete keeps Maxine for work and when she hears the truck, she sometimes runs over to take a ride with him.

“I hear those air starters and I know it’s my dad,” she says.

The family just went with Pete to a classic car and truck show in New Britain.

“He just loves to see those vehicles,” Deb says.

And there are people who love to see Pete and Maxine. Once, when Pete was driving Maxine in North Madison, a garbage truck stopped and someone yelled out asking Pete if he remembered him.

“I’d given him a ride in the truck years ago when he was a kid,” Pete says.

People stop and ask Pete questions about Maxine regularly; some take pictures. Some even ask him what he would sell Maxine for, but that is something that is not going to happen. Pete and Maxine will not be parted.

“I’ll tell you the truth. If someone said they’d give me a new truck, I’d say ‘No.’ I’d still take the old one. It does the same job as a new one,” he says.

And she does it with love.