Larry Davidson's 1932 Ford. Patrick Casper's 1955 Ford 640. An early 1950s Ford. A small Ford tractor.

Inflated Trucks, Inflated Food Prices

I spent almost all day yesterday at the McHenry County Fair. It's one of the perks of living in Woodstock, the fair comes to you instead of you having to go to it. I'm a suburban kid from a county so urbanized it doesn't have a real fair anymore, but we got to watch Heidi's extended family win a big prize for beef cattle and watch one of the kids win their first runner up for swine showmanship. Have you ever had a pork burger? Not a bratwurst burger, but just a regular ground pork burger? They're amazing.

This day out with the family came just a few days after transcribing a New York Times article from 1908 titled “Motor Vehicle Will Be Commercial Necessity.” As it's from New York City, it's focused on delivery and retail, but farming is a business too.

“The average man of business must be impressed with the purpose of the commercial vehicle before that machine can hope to come into its own. He must know how to use the machine economically in the saving of time and labor in order to find it truly economical...The commercial vehicle has the capacity far beyond the horse. It is an insensate machine of fixed power under normal conditions of road and grade. That business man preparing to use it must figure to get all he can out of it in distance and time. To this end, at least, he must put out of his mind the delivery schedules which have been limited by the limitations of the horse. Installing a power machine that with a margin of time covers the route of two horse wagons at a saving of expense for one driver and one deliveryman suggests the saving that may be effected by the commercial vehicle under economical conditions. Moving a double quantity of load in half the time required by the horse.”

That was the year Henry Ford started putting the affordable Model T in the hands of regular folks, and farmers fitted wooden frames to the back to make the first stake-bed pickups. The role reversal completed quite early, and pickup trucks are now a necessity for work while horses are a luxury for those who can afford one.

Thanks to a century on the farms the pickup truck is an icon of American labor. Use of the pickup truck has spread to every imaginable occupation but since vans are more practical for most trades the pickup truck still has its strongest association with farming. Pickup trucks have been incorporated into holiday decorations, celebrated in countless country songs, and the Ford F-150 is our most popular selling vehicle.

The modern F Series pickup truck has come a long way from the basic farm machine of a Model T with a bed, with a 2WD F-150 having a base price of $36,965 before taxes & fees, and trucks costing $70K and up coming with luxury features that previous generations only dreamt of for their most luxurious cars. This isn't unique to the pickup truck, as the entire market has been focusing on higher margin vehicles in lower volumes to compensate for higher labor costs and chip shortages.

In this case making pickup trucks into giant luxury cars without the luxury label pretentiousness helped the pickup truck appeal to a wider range of customers. Ray Delahanty had a great quote on this last year, he said “Not a fan of the term 'virtue signaling' but if anything is virtue signaling it's spending $80K on a vehicle that's essentially an SUV with a little bit of space in the back to signal what a no-nonsense, salt of the earth, hardworking dude you are.”

The downside is it's also increased the cost of farming. It's become another source of inflation for the people who need them to run as cheaply as possible for their farms to be profitable. Even if you get a used base model, you're still buying a truck that was engineered to accomodate higher end features and built on an assembly line that has stations and facilities to accomodate the more expensive versions. And increased new vehicle prices push up used car prices.

I appreciate having a pickup truck for the aesthetic and occasional home repair job. Since I'm usually hauling furniture or cardboard boxes instead of dirt & hay the pickup bed can be a drawback compared to a van, but the mid-range Maverick cost thousands less than the most basic Transit Connect van Ford offers. Plus it just feels better when listening to Sawyer Brown on the back roads outside of town, and I didn't spend anywhere near $80K. The 4-cylinder, front-drive, unibody pickup with its 4'4" bed is not meant for the same kind of work that a full size truck is made for, so I'm also not putting undue demand in the same market as work trucks. I have the kind of truck someone who doesn't really need one should buy. Rangers, Ridgelines, Santa Cruzes, and Colorados are good for this, too.

Engineering a truck to be just a simple work machine and cranking out a hundred million of them as efficiently as possible would be more aligned with Henry Ford's philosophy, and would help reduce expenses for small farms and all kinds of small businesses. Even if it would be more expensive to re-engineer a simpler version of the full size pickup truck that would not accomodate the higher end features, it seems like it would at least be cheaper to build them in a separate factory from the luxury models where colors and options could be minimized for the sake of efficiency. That way people who need an 8 foot bed on four driven wheels could get them as cheaply as possible while the folks who want their King Ranch leather or Raptor horsepower could still buy those trucks.

But then wouldn't automakers or dealers just pocket the difference since the market will bear the higher cost? I don't think there's a point where pickup trucks are so expensive that an alternative is preferable, but we're all going to be paying the costs of pickup-truck-as-plaything in the form of higher food prices either as farmers directly pass the costs along or in the form of less competition as more small farmers get squeezed out of their family farms.

History Beyond the Bumpers

The Crittenden Automotive Library includes information from all aspects of automotive transportation and competition. This section highlights topics related to automobiles other than vehicles themselves.

Due to pickup trucks' long association with every kind of occupation, there's a lot of information, support, and sales that happen outside of the traditional classic American car hobby.

Mecum sells a lot of really interesting classic trucks in between the tractors at their Gone Farmin' shows in Davenport, Iowa and East Moline, Illinois. I found a copy of Wine Country Trucks of Napa & Sonoma Counties walking past the food & cookbook section of a bookstore, well outside of the traditional automotive section. The National Truck Equipment Association puts on Work Truck Week, which is a version of the manufacturer auto shows for commercial vehicles and the companies that modify them or make specialized equipment for them.

There are organizations that include vintage trucks, even when they're not their primary focus, like the McHenry County Antique Farm Equipment Association of Illinois.

Each industry that has vehicles or machinery tends to have historians preserving photographs and documentation, and each industry that has adopted pickup trucks for fleet use likely has something about their pickup trucks in their archives. This can be railroading, firefighting, and police. The Internet Movie Cars Database has stills and lists of trucks seen on screen in Hollywood productions.

The M880-M893 are the U.S. Army's designation for various versions of the Dodge W-body pickup truck of the 1970s & early 1980s. These were replaced by the M1008-M1031 or CUCV, which is a General Motors taking over as supplier with trucks derived from K5 Blazer and C/K parts. Being U.S. government publications, there are plenty of copyright-free shop manuals and documentation available for these trucks.

If you're interested in pickup trucks these are just some of the very interesting rabbit holes that you can lose yourself in.

629.2

The Dewey Decimal System's designation for automobiles falls within the 629.2 range. This section is about The Crittenden-Walczak Collection.

With the carload of shop manuals counted the total number of books in the Collection is just slightly over 1,500. There are still several small boxes of books from recent library book sales to go through and inventory, but I was happy to cross this point.

The office move has been progressing indirectly. The entire process has been like one of those square puzzles with 15 little squares and one open space, and you have to move the squares around to the open space in just the right order to get everything where you want it.

Well, another square is just finishing up this week, and that means more storage space opened up for the next step. Just a few more steps and then I'll start clearing out enough of the basement where the new office is going.

In the meantime I was able to put the Bibliography online. It's the new version of the Reference Desk book lists, but instead of just listing the books we own I'm able to post any book I find in one unified list with Availability notes if it's on CarsAndRacingStuff.com or on a bookshelf. It's the book version of the Audio Playlist and Video Guide.

It currently consists of 198 book volumes not counting shop manuals, since there are just far too many of those to list all of them. Listings of ones I have on CarsAndRacingStuff.com or available for the Reference Desk will be listed on their vehicles' Topic Pages.

Telemetry

CarsAndRacingStuff.com site statistics.

Good increases for the month of July,

The Top 5 pages for the month of May (not counting basic index pages) were...

Article: The tricks to resetting a Dodge Grand Caravan Computer

Article: We Know Who Tax The Rich 100 Is And Here's The Proof

Topic: 1979 Ford-Lincoln-Mercury Lineup

Topic: Chevrolet C30

Topic: Pontiac Grand Am

About The Crittenden Automotive Library

The Crittenden Automotive Library @ CarsAndRacingStuff.com, based in Woodstock, Illinois, is a free online collection of information relating to not only cars, trucks, and motorcycles, but also the roads they drive on, the races they compete in, cultural works based on them, government regulation of them, and the people who design, build, and drive them. We are dedicated to the preservation and free distribution of information relating to all types of cars and road-going vehicles for those seeking the greater understanding of these very important elements of modern society, how automobiles have affected how people live around the world, or for the general study of automotive history and anthropology. In addition to the historical knowledge, we preserve current events for future generations.

The Library currently consists of over 896,900 pages of books, periodicals, and documents, over 56,000 individual articles, more than 18 days of video & 24 days of audio, more than 36,100 photographs & other images.

About The Crittenden-Walczak Collection

The combined personal collections of John Walczak & Bill Crittenden provide reference materials for The Crittenden Automotive Library. The collection currently includes 1,338 different book volumes/editions, 2,182 unqiue periodical issues and 861 catalog issues, as well as booklets, brochures, comic books, hero cards, event programs, and 371 hours of video.