Trucks, trucks, and more trucks

[John Hofstetter <hofs@domain.elided>]

Digesters, 

Because a fellow digester shamed me into seeing my local truck museum 
before coming to see his, I went today to the Hays Truck Museum in 
Woodland, CA. It shares the site with an Antique Tractor Museum. 

What a fascinating place! 

Just a few quick thoughts and feelings to maybe tempt some of you into 
going there to see it. Theresa, it would be a great experience for the 
Sierra Scout group, in my opinion. 

Apparently, the Woodland area never reached the Farmall stage that made 
the displays of tractors in Monroe and Lynden, Washington, and also the 
Tulare tractor show seem to me to be predominately Farmalls. I don't 
think the museum in Woodland had a single Farmall. They did have a lot of 
McCormick-Deering tractors, which I suspect that most of you know were 
the products of the new International Harvester Company. They had a lot 
of Fordsons, many many Cletracs, a lot of Holts (pre-Caterpillars), a lot 
of Allis-Chalmers and so on, but really not many recent Internationals. 

The truck museum, on the other hand had Internationals. About the second 
vehicle inside the door was a 1912 (?) International with big skinny 
buggy wheels on it. In the middle of the radiator it had a brass logo 
with IHC with the letters all kind of intertwined. Neat.

They have a new Navistar Eagle Tractor with deluxe sleeper on display, 
and they let you climb up in the cab and look at a multitude of switches 
and guages for everything. It's like being in the cockpit of an airplane, 
but better because you don't have to leave the ground. The sleeper is 
elegant, but the mattress in the sleeper is built for two people 
entwined, not two people sleeping peacefully. It was an absolutely 
beautiful truck and the dealer and adjunct companies that are responsible 
for it being there deserve recognition for making it possible. 

I learned so much today about trucks, and  a lot of it was stuff that I'd 
wondered about in the past. 
Haven't you ever wondered:
Peterbilt, what's the history of that truck?  
Why were all Consolidated Freightline's trucks Freightliners at one time? 
Maybe they still are, I don't know. 

Howard had remembered seeing a Powell pickup there, so I looked for it. 
In 1954 and 1955 a company built a kind of squarish heavy duty body out 
of really thick sheet metal all screwed together, and put this body on 
used Plymouth automobiles with their bodies removed. They rebuilt the 
motors, offered a limited warranty and sold a couple of hundred in the 
two years. 
Very strange enterprise that in retrospect seems to have had little 
chance of success. 

Howard also remembered having seen a Macdonald brand truck used on the 
wharves of San Francisco. The bed of the truck was only about 8 inches 
above the ground, and it had a PTO rope capstan winch to pull freight up 
onto the bed of the truck. This was before fork lifts. In order to make 
this very heavy duty truck with this low a bed, every part of the drive 
train sat at the very front of the truck. When the wheel moved in 
steering, a massive amount of metal moved with it. I was going to try and 
explain it, but it won't work, suffice to say that the power steering box 
must have weighed 250 lbs. and had these massive connectors down to the 
wheels themselves. Very strange and very interesting. 

In the early years of this century there were over 350 companies making 
trucks. This huge collection has samples from a lot of these companies. 
My only complaint is that they don't open the hoods on hardly any trucks 
so you can't really see the engines. To their credit, they do have some 
representative engines on display also. 

If you haven't been to Woodland to the Hays Museum, you have something to 
look forward to. 

Sit in the cab of that Navistar Eagle and just try not wanting to be a 
truck driver, at least for a while. 

While there, I bought a copy of,"International Truck Color History", and 
I've enjoyed looking at it a lot. I'm sure Scott must sell it. I think I 
saw it in his booth in Monroe, but didn't buy it at the time. Many of its 
wonderful Scout pictures were supplied by John Glancy, and one of the 
pics is of a Patriot that can serve as a model for John L. in his 
restoration, except he'll want his to look better than new. The picture 
on my web site of my SSII is much nicer than the one they have in the 
book, and I think they should use my pic, if they do a revised edition 
(g).  Good book.

John H.




John Hofstetter  "Ol'Saline's Web Site" www.goldrush.com/~hofs
"Perhaps more to remember than ever really happened"
Life Member, National Rifle Ass.     California Rifle and Pistol Ass.
Member, Sierra Macintosh Users Group and MacTwain Macintosh Users Group
Charter Member, FRIENDS OF DEATH VALLEY   Member, Blue Ribbon Coalition
Life Member, Association of California School Administrators
Owner of 79 Scout Terra "It's a legend"