Old Trucks Are Loaded With History

January 7, 1999|By Chicago Tribune

MASON CITY, Iowa - Lloyd Van Horn wandered through the old quonset hut that once was a turkey farm here and pointed to his pride and joy - a gleaming Little Giant.

Elsewhere in the hut and in some adjacent barns are a Master, Old Reliable, All-American and Dearborn.

These are all turkeys, albeit valuable ones, but not the feathered kind.

As a sideline to his auto parts business north of here, Van Horn runs probably the only public museum in Middle America devoted to antique trucks.

Much of his collection is trucks built in Chicago, which, for the first half of the century, was a center for the manufacture of commercial vehicles - everything from buses to dump trucks.

Since 1899, the year after the first American truck appeared (a Winton from Cleveland), at least 88 companies in Chicago and its environs have gone into the business of building trucks. As many as 26 companies were operating in 1919.

Only a handful survive.

The biggest is Navistar International Corp., which for most of this century was known as International Harvester Corp. and which built trucks under the International and IHC names.

``We built our first truck in 1907, and 91 years later we're still doing it,'' said John R. Horne, Navistar's chairman and chief executive.

Diamond T was Chicago's No. 2 truck builder, but its vehicles now exist mainly in antiques collections.

The family-owned Hendrickson Motor Truck Co. was a major builder of specialty trucks until it was sold in 1978 to John Boler of Boler Industries, who then sold the truck operation to a Michigan manufacturer that makes HME trucks.

``In the early part of the century, trucking was largely regional, and, as a result, so was truck building,'' said Donald F. Wood, professor of transportation at San Francisco State University's College of Business and an author.

The earliest trucks were primarily delivery vehicles that shuttled goods around the big cities in competition with horse-drawn wagons in the first two decades of the century, when railroads were the dominant form of transportation and there was no national highway system. Rural areas had only dirt roads that became impassable in bad weather, but cities had paved streets that could handle heavy trucks year-round. So local markets for trucks developed in the cities.

Rural areas didn't have paved roads until the 1920s, and the big intercity truck - the tractor-trailer or semitrailer - didn't come into widespread use until World War II.

No less than 29 companies started building trucks in Chicago in the first decade of this century, and they were joined by an additional 40 companies from 1911 through 1920.

But the mortality rate was high; 49 of those companies failed or were bought out by the end of 1920.

The trucks of some of those short-lived companies are worth big bucks as collectors' items. A fully restored All-American, which sold for $1,595 at the end of World War I, can fetch 10 times that.

Restoration of an antique truck can cost 10 times its original selling price.

``When I got started [about 30 years ago), the really rare trucks were in such bad shape that it cost a fortune to restore them. Now they're almost prohibitively costly,'' said Van Horn.

That's why he maintains what he calls his ``boneyard'' behind the museum - for parts.

Old Reliable was typical of Chicago's early truck builders. The Henry Lee Power Co. in 1911 decided to build a three-ton motor truck and named it Old Reliable.

Old Reliable's Model B is as good an example as any of an average truck for its time. It had a 28.9-horsepower engine that provided power to the axles by means of a double chain and could carry up to 21/2 tons of cargo. Top speed was usually no more than 20 mph, which produced a bone-jarring ride on solid rubber tires. In most trucks of that time, the cargo was considered more important than the driver, who often rode in an open cab. The Model B carried a price tag of $3,500.

These days, a deluxe over-the-road tractor-trailer weighs 40 tons and can carry more than seven fully loaded Old Reliables. It has a 600-horsepower engine that enables it to roar over interstate highways at 70 mph on up to 18 pneumatic tires. The driver sits in air-conditioned or heated comfort in a cab that includes a miniapartment with beds, microwave and refrigerator in back. The tractor alone costs $120,000, and the average trailer costs more than $18,000, according to industry officials.

Diamond T Motor Car Co. was the other of Chicago's big three. While Hendrickson used engineering expertise and Harvester a distribution system, Diamond T stressed quality: The Diamond stood for quality and the T for the last name of its owner, Charles A. Tilt.

``Old man Tilt was a stickler for quality,'' said Gordon. ``International always underpriced us, but we'd tell our customers if they wanted a cheap truck don't waste our time.''

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