With the benefit of hindsight, I think it all comes down to the vegetable truck. Every so often at an auction or a show, you’ll spot one of these light-duty Chevrolets from either side of World War II, commonly called huckster wagons. The official name for the body style was “canopy,” but the trucks were largely sold to neighborhood produce vendors who rolled around and hawked apples, radishes and cucumbers before the supermarket was invented.
This truck, though, was different. It was an enormous chain-drive Mack from the early 1930s, painted deep green with gold leaf lettering, with a stake body that hauled crates of fruits and vegetables to the loading dock of the Key Food supermarket in my Brooklyn neighborhood of East New York. The dock backed up to the garages in the apartment complex where my family then lived.
Best guesstimate, it was around 1960. The Mack reflected how fresh produce got to market in New York before temperature-controlled trailers came into wide usage. The city’s big fruit and vegetable market back then was the Hunt’s Point Terminal in the Bronx, which this Mack had undoubtedly visited to pick up its load before making its delivery rounds in Brooklyn.
The goods were packed into pine-slatted crates and then stacked so high in the stake body that the rig was about to topple. As the swampers hefted the full crates of lettuce and tomatoes inside the market, empty ones–and the scraps clinging to them–were tossed out the back door, where the vegetative waste rotted and reeked. It was a hint of the forthcoming sanitation strike that devastated New York in 1968, and had a lot to do with my family bailing on Fun City for good later that year.
Anyway, back to the Mack. This was probably a Mack AC, a late-generation Bulldog with the Renault-inspired–or was it the other way around?–downward-sloping sheetmetal hood. It had an open C-shaped cab with rudimentary doors and a flat, vertical windshield. The wheels were massively thick spokes with detachable rims. Best of all, the gigantic “High Hat” L-head inline-four, its aluminum-head cylinders cast in pairs, had an open exhaust pipe that I could have stuck my head inside. Wow, when that sucker blat-blatted down Liberty Avenue, you could hear every cylinder banging like a 105mm howitzer. I loved it.
A little farther down the street was the firehouse of Engine Company 236. Built during the years when Brooklyn had its own fire department, it came complete with a keystone above the apparatus door, engraved with a capital B. Inside the house, next to the watch desk, was a Ward La France triple-combination pumper, one of scores that protected New York City in those days, and also unmuffled. The roar as it left the firehouse after the gong telegraphed an alarm could knock you on your back. It didn’t need a siren. This was the FDNY born in the image of legendary past chiefs like Hugh Bonner and Smoky Joe Martin, and the rigs still had open cabs (this was before some city residents decided it was a good idea to throw bricks from rooftops at fire trucks as they wailed past).
Elsewhere in Brooklyn, Ladder Company 157 in Flatbush ran with an American La France 700 Series tractor-drawn aerial without cab doors, one of the few big municipal orders of these ladder trucks so finished. Most of the firefighters rode on the side of the rig, open to the elements.
The point? We all may harbor at least a latent tendency to straight-arm the world of trucks, ever since pickups replaced cars as our daily drivers by the tens of millions, but they loom large in our collective memories about what a really jaw-dropping vehicle can be. I guess that when you’re a kid in the city, where everything around you exists on a highly compressed scale, a truck, any kind of truck, looms a lot larger than it already is.
It follows logically, then, that a fascination with trucks, their intrusive noise and presence, could easily get somebody riled up enough to pay attention to cars as well. Example: Blocks away from the Key Food on Liberty Avenue was a restaurant called Abbraciamento’s, which had sensational pizza. I can still distinctly remember the owner pulling up in a gold Buick Riviera Gran Sport–the first Riviera of any kind I’d ever seen with my own eyes. It was a stunner.
In our complex, somebody’s boyfriend, I think, had a white 1960 Chevrolet Impala with the bubble top, its factory T-3 headlamps replaced with Lucas units, mimicking the customs of that era. It was around then that I first started paying serious and consistent attention to such things.
There’s at least one salient reason why trucks–the big ones–are somewhat on the fringes of collecting. It involves people’s ability to park and store them. If you’ve got a Full Classic, and you want to park it in the driveway or in front of your townhouse, nobody’s going to have a problem with it. Same thing, in all likelihood, if you own a 1961 Plymouth Valiant. Change that to a White 3000 cabover, however, and you might get a summons from your local building or property-code inspector.
It’s not right, but that’s reality, whether anybody likes it or not. Like I said, a lot of people tend to look down on trucks, as if one is going to drive down their property values.
Other reasons, on the other hand, make a big rig highly desirable for a collector, the lead one being cost, a sliver off the cash chunk than can be associated with a car from the past. This little rummage through memories isn’t anything about collector values or restoration ease, really. The overreaching notion here is simply respect. Like the slogan goes, if you’ve got it, a truck brought it. And don’t forget it.
