All our lives, we’ve all heard, “If you got it, a truck brought it.” That’s always been true, long before most of us were even percolating. Let’s affirm it by looking at some photos of rigs from bygone days, which came from a collection bequeathed to Hemmings by Marshall Johnson of Mechanicville, Virginia. For you meticulous blogsters, the collection also anchored our recent discussion of the armored car built on a Model A chassis. Admittedly, we can’t identify every truck make here, but what memories.
We can’t see enough of the radiator emblem to be certain, but this may be a Graham Brothers chassis, here wearing a new body from the Finn Body Shop in Cincinnati. Your grandparents’ groceries were delivered in an A&P truck like this. Much later, a lot of A&Ps were rebranded as Superfresh markets.
Figuring the make is easier here. These are Sterling trucks, manufactured in Milwaukee. Check out those drive chains, something you can’t even find on a Harley anymore. Around 1930, Sterling produced a huge variety of trucks with both chain and shaft drive, including these dump rigs for a Pittsburgh gravel firm.
I’ll be 53 this year, and I can still remember ice trucks from my childhood, which then mainly delivered big blocks to local taverns that chopped them up and used them to keep Rheingold and Piels bottles chilled in their metal coolers. This rig, based on a Model A (AA?) chassis with duals on Seventies-ish rear spokes, was definitely not hauling coal. Lucky for the driver, the load got lighter as the trip got longer in one continuous trickle. For handling coal, you needed something like …
… this. At the apartments where my family lived in Brooklyn during the 1960s, the coal bin in the cellar got filled by a truck with a body just like this, a chute attaching from the small rear gate. Those swept louvers on the hood sides may, or may not, give away the brand of truck here, given that it was photographed new outside a Pittsburgh shop that specialized in custom bodywork. Beautiful truck, though.
What a beast. This was when a well-equipped truck had padding on its bench seat, not a Sirius satellite radio. Peg this one at 1930 or so, a regal-looking monster that was hauling heavy aggregates. The badge is at the wrong angle to peg through our guides, but we can tell you that the Oneida truck, built through about 1931 in Green Bay, Wisconsin, used similar louver patterning on its hood sides. Enjoy, and if you know, share.
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