Origins of the Light-Duty Pickup Truck

I recently sold my 1958 Chevrolet Apache 3100 and now I miss it. Anyone who likes to work on and restore old cars needs a pickup sooner or later. I don’t desire the huge macho lollypops seen and heard on today’s highways–the ones with enormous tires, dazzling chrome bars, and more lights than a semi. I just need a traditional pickup. The kind used to haul 10 sheets of 8-foot-long drywall, or half a ton of garden mulch.

The origin of “pickup” for small utilitarian trucks seems obvious. You use them to pick up cargo. But that’s not accurate. In 1925, someone at Ford had the idea of offering a cargo tray that could be bolted onto the rear of a Model T after removing the rear turtle deck. This tray was called a pickup bed because it was offered as an accessory that you could pick up at the dealership’s parts department.

The idea caught on, and soon other automakers offered similar options. There were variations, too. In the late 1930s, Ford, Chevrolet, and Plymouth coupes could be fitted with a cargo bed that would telescope into and out of the trunk, keeping wares out of the elements. These were favored by small business owners.

If you were looking for more prestige and style, you could purchase a Hudson Big Boy pickup or a Studebaker Coupe Express. These used both a passenger car’s chassis and elegant front-end styling. The Hudson and Studebaker designs were attractive and set a gentleman farmer or merchant apart from neighbors when driving to town for Saturday shopping.

In 1935, Marmon-Herrington began converting Ford pickups to four-wheel drive for use in muddy rural regions. After the war, in 1946, Dodge was the first to offer a factory-built four-wheel-drive pickup called the Power Wagon. Then during the mid-1950s, the Big Three started offering stylish light-duty trucks like the 1955 Chevrolet Cameo, its slab sides made of fiberglass. Early Corvettes didn’t sell as well as anticipated, so the fiberglass facilities were put to work making truck panels.

The big revolution came in 1957 when Ford unveiled its Ranchero using the division’s restyled passenger car platform, paired with a full-size bed for maximum utility. It was a knockout. The Ranchero caused Chevrolet to scramble and build its El Camino in 1959. These models started a trend that lasted into the 1980s, resulting in some of the best-looking light-duty vehicles ever. It’s ironic that the pickup began by adding a utility bed to a passenger car and wound up returning to that format 40 years later.

Australia gets the credit here. It was way ahead of the U.S. in building stylish pickups from the 1920s on. Holden (then owned by GM), and other down-under makes, offered good-looking cars with pickup beds right from the start. In Australia’s vast rural agricultural countryside, farmers and ranchers needed them for daily use, yet wanted to look good when driving to church on Sunday. Owning two vehicles was out of the question for many. The Aussies still use these good-looking utes (short for utility pickups).

In the States, the 1970s brought the “muscle truck” phenomenon, sparked by Mopar 360 V-8-powered haulers that could do 0 to 60 mph in 8 seconds. I am not sure I understand why you would want to do that in a pickup. They have become very popular, as have others that followed. The latest generation of trucks are more like gigantic quasi-military crew cab monsters fitted with earth-mover tires.

One might speculate that such vehicles would be driven by guys wearing tank tops, sporting a mullet, who are the subject of a restraining order. But it is equally possible that building-size trucks are being driven by accountants and optometrists who want to project a rugged mystique. That is a lot of dismal miles-per-gallon machinery to drive back and forth to the office merely as a fashion statement. Such gargantuan vehicles push the definition of the pickup truck to the absurd, in my opinion.

I’m happy with a used truck equipped with an inline-six engine, a three-speed manual transmission, a manual choke, and one sun visor for the driver. Oh, and an AM radio would be nice. If the bed is a little scraped or banged up, that’s fine too, because then I won’t have to fret when I pick up a load of mulch.