The Call of the Pickup Truck

In pursuing life’s acquisitions, we arrive at a moment of meditation: Do I need this, or do I just want it? Our thoughts become bothersome arguments with ourselves. So we yield to the irresistible belief that probably, someday, we will surely need what we want right now. Just think how handy it will be.

* From such self-convincing impulses, many a good fad has been hatched and much money has changed hands. Sometimes billions of dollars. While we may come to regret our decisions from time to time, it is pretty much a physical impossibility to kick ourselves in the behind. And feeling guilty is likewise futile, unless you seek peculiar satisfaction in it. Anyway, before long something else is apt to demand our attention with the question, “Do I need this, too?”

Which, roundabout, brings us to the pickup truck.

The best-selling car in America is a pickup truck.

That is a fact. Has been for a long time. It is also a fact that there is not enough horse manure, used washing machines, oversize toolboxes, camper shells and boat trailers to justify so many pickups as a matter of actual need.

Unless answering the call of one’s culture is a need. In which case, it is a deep one. And it cannot be discounted that Americans and their pickups are a love affair, as inexplicable and undeniable as any romance, and surely we need this, too.

Besides, pickups are handy.

Sonny Olson is a third-generation Montana cattleman, who, if you hear him tell it, is a practical sort. For instance, his haircut. He shears his hair once a year, just after the snow melts, when he reckons he won’t freeze his bare scalp. By next winter his hair will have grown out for insulation and his hat will fit tight again against the winds of blizzards. He wears a bandanna tied nattily around his weather-beaten neck and stuffs his blue jeans inside 14-inch-long boots to keep his pants from getting soiled. As for getting his boots soiled, why, hell, that’s what boots are for, like pickups. But if you look closely, you will find that the boots are handmade and cost $500.

Today, Olson is driving a 1960s Ford pickup across the Missouri Breaks range. The paint is red, sandblasted by wind and roughened by sun. It’s unwashed, the fenders wrinkled from use. The interior is a pleasing mess, like a good ranch kitchen.

“Pickups?” he says, “I got eight.”

Eight?

“Well, I got more’n that. But I got eight good ‘uns.”

One for carrying fencing, one for hauling fuel tanks, one with a camper shell, another pulls horse trailers and so on, leaving room here and there on his 20,000-acre spread for spares, just in case. His needs are many, Olson explains. Yes, but as with $500 boots and a proper bandanna, this cowboy is not beyond considerations of style when it comes to doing his work, even if he won’t exactly admit it.

Along with most, if not all, truck owners, Olson believes there are many pretenders but only one satisfactory pickup. It is the Ford, vintage 1968-’72, with more than 100,000 break-in miles on it.

“In ‘73, they started putting plastic in ‘em. You take one of those new pickups out with a load of feed and those calves will start pushing and shoving at ya and do $500 damage to the body. Humph.”

As for the 100,000-mile break-in, well, that gets the price down to about the same as a pair of boots. So a fellow can have several.

And if it happens he feels comfortably debonair when he gets behind the wheel, afresh with a new haircut, who will begrudge him?

the ford f-series pickup has been the no. 1-selling vehicle in the United States for 14 years. Trucks of all brands, and by their larger definition vans and sport utility vehicles, will soon outsell cars domestically, according to Detroit auto executives.

In 1995, Ford sold 366,000 Tauruses, making it No. 1 among sedans and wagons. But Ford sold nearly twice as many--691,000--full-size F-Series pickups. The No. 2 vehicle in the country, with 537,000 sold, was General Motors’ C/K full-size pickup. Chrysler’s best seller, ranked either 10th or 11th, according to different industry analysts, was the Dodge Ram pickup at 272,000.

Sometime this year, perhaps even as we speak, the Ford F-Series, in production since 1948, will exceed the Volkswagen Beetle’s record of 22.5 million sold, says Bill George, Ford’s western regional corporate news manager.

The pickup has been a savior for Detroit. Back in those not-so-distant dark days of the American car business, the full-size pickup never let the Big Three down.

The Japanese have been unable to crack the dominance of domestic full-size trucks, although their mini pickups have been big sellers. Most overseas car companies never tried, perhaps figuring the concept of the pickup truck was too, ah, foreign.

And now, on the growing success of trucks, led by pickup trucks, Detroit banks its hopes for renewal in the 21st century.

“Without a doubt, the explosive growth of the truck market was the biggest story in the business last year,” says Ross Roberts, vice president and general manager of Ford Division at Ford Motor Co. Despite the growth in vans and SUVs, “full-size pickups still outsell every other kind of truck.”

Sales of pickups, like the vehicles’ on-the-road reputations with owners, are dependable. “Brand loyalty, and that was back before we knew what it was, came into being with the pickup. Truck buyers are immensely loyal,” Roberts says.

Perhaps one reason is that pickups are steeped in nationalism. As a cultural touchstone, the pickup lags behind only the Stars and Stripes as an authentic, home-sprouted expression of what we call all-Americanism. Apple pie, you may remember, is a British creation. Hot dogs are German sausages. The pickup truck, though, is America’s own proposition, wrapped in cultural myths, adaptations and contradictions, just like the rest of society.

No other country is nuts over pickups like America. Most everywhere else, excepting perhaps Canada and Australia, pickups are beasts of burden with no romance whatsoever. But spend a few weeks around Americans and their pickups, and one feels an irresistible urge toward profundity: Pickups are an outlet and escape; they unite us and divide us. They represent both social diversity and social conformity, a costume and disguise.

But profundities depend on at least some logic. Unfortunately, logic goes only so far when you consider the daily commute in a vehicle that has more room for fertilizer than family or friends. And Detroit’s buyer surveys show that, in fact, the No. 1 use of pickups is the daily drive to and from work.

“For most of us, there is no rational reason whatsoever to own a pickup truck in the U.S.A. Yet, you cannot deny the magnitude of this lunacy,” laughs Joe Molina of JMPR, a Woodland Hills automotive public relations firm.

“The pickup truck is the horse of the modern range, the road. And there’s a little cowboy in a lot of us. It’s an anti-snobbery thing, a way to thumb your nose at people and prove you don’t need to prove anything. There’s some toy in the truck, too. Cowboys and Tonka toys! And, of course, there’s some chic in pickups, too.”

Well, that’s a start.

*

The passions, however, are not evenly shared.

“We don’t get too many people coming in pickups. I would evoke zero as the concept,” says Chuck Pick of the venerable Chuck’s Parking Service in Sherman Oaks, himself something of a knowledgeable automotive observer.

“I can count on my hand the number of times I’ve parked a pickup in 35 years in this business. Not many people load up the wife and kids in the pickup and say, ‘Let’s go to Bistro Garden!’ ”

He pauses. “I’m trying to imagine it.”

Sure enough, California bucks the national trend, as it often does on matters automotive. According to industry analyst R.L. Polk, the Honda Civic, Accord and Toyota Camry are the top three 1995 sellers here, only then followed by the Ford pickup and the Ford Explorer sport utility vehicle. The Chevy C/K pickup was No. 7.

But Californians are second to no one in the love, and money, they lavish on their pickups, and have fashioned from them a distinctive “California look” in truck. You’ve seen it: low and colorful and nicely washed.

It’s lunchtime and Ellen McKoy is on her way to an Italian restaurant in Diamond Bar, east of Los Angeles. She is wearing a business suit and tasteful jewelry, and her hair is styled fashionably--an observation offered by way of contrast to a Montana cowboy.

“The average pickup buyer spends $1,000 to $1,500 to accessorize his or her truck within 90 days of purchase,” McKoy says. “Your basic truck is just yards of sheet metal, and that lends itself to expression. You can make your truck look very different than someone else’s truck. And that’s the whole point: to make an individualistic statement about your lifestyle. Most people who are buying pickups are making a statement about independence, about the Marlboro man thing, about being American.”

McKoy’s pickup is a five-speed Ford Ranger with an extended cab, sunroof, hood scoops, fancy wheels and Cayman green metallic paint overlaid with wild mauve and burgundy vinyl graphics. The bed is covered with a matching hard-shell cover, and each time McKoy touches the accelerator, the truck rumbles, suggesting further custom work under the hood. The body has been lowered via a “four-and-six drop,” four inches in the rear and six in the front.

McKoy is public relations director for the Specialty Equipment Market Assn., a 3,000-member trade group of businesses that make and sell automotive add-ons. In 1994, the most recent year for which data are available, Americans spent $3.3 billion on accessories for their pickups--with sales now growing 15% a year.

Sales of performance and suspension accessories are increasing at a steady rate. But appearance add-ons “are just exploding,” McKoy says, such as the popular accessory bed liner to protect the truck against scratches in the event it actually has to haul something. That will never happen with her truck. “It is not for schlepping,” she says.

So, a hypothetical question. Two people in the marriage but only one truck. What happens if . . .

“I get the truck and the two cats,” she grins.

Yes, pickups have gender implications, or used to anyway. They burn gas, or diesel, and emit, among other things, traces of testosterone. Or so say men who drive them. Women have grown tired of that old wheeze. Ford spokesman Jim Bright says women accounted for 10% of full-size pickups sales last year, but that has doubled so far this year, to nearly 20%, with the redesigned 1997 models.

The women’s market is strong enough now that pickups are being engineered specifically to accommodate them. Seat belts are adjustable for their smaller frames, solving an often-voiced complaint of female drivers and passengers. Optional running boards make possible the long entry step in a short skirt. And in the new Ford, the passenger-side air bag can be switched off so that Mom can strap in a child seat and not risk injuring the baby with an inflating bag during a collision. Men driving pickups have been known to call the feature the “mother-in-law switch.”

Women, even women who lower their trucks, argue the safety of what designers call “command seating,” which gives an expanded vista of surrounding traffic. Explaining the advantages of sitting high while riding low, McKoy brushes her front bumper over a speed bump as she heads toward a parking space. By now, it should be apparent that arguing with a pickup truck owner will get you little.

Overall, the pickup truck is undergoing more fundamental changes than ever before. Robert G. Aikins is the chief designer of Ford’s new 1997 F-Series, a curvier and plusher pickup than the company has ever produced. His job was to take Ford’s treasured goose and keep the golden eggs coming.

The result is a pickup several long steps from its traditional heritage. “We needed to continue to satisfy our traditional customers for a work vehicle and at the same time to satisfy the expanding market for what we call ‘personal use,’ ” Aikins says at his Dearborn, Mich., design studio. “What was once a tool has become a replacement for the car.” So the new pickups ride decidedly softer, like a car, and have car-like appointments, including leather interiors and power windows. But the biggest change is the addition of a full-size back seat, the so-called three-door truck, which is a lot like a car with a colossal open trunk that looks like a pickup. In the first months of production, three-quarters of the 1997 Fords were sold with three doors, so-called because backseat passengers have only one door, located on the curbside. The rub for Aikins and other truck designers was to accomplish all this without sacrificing the pickup’s fabled reputation for durability. People who buy pickups want more than just oversize cup holders. They want to believe that sinew and brawn lie beneath, uncompromised, even as the air conditioner blows in their faces and the CD changer takes them through all of Emmylou Harris in surround-sound with the touch of one button. These days, some of that reputation can be maintained by advertising alone. As in, “Ford Tough! . . . clang!” Beyond that, is the legend still justified? If you get in a sedan and Ford’s Ross Roberts gets in a pickup, will he still be driving after you have been towed to the salvage yard? “I don’t know if it’s true,” he replies, “but I sure as hell believe it.”

*

David Kiger also believes.

“Naw, I’d never sell it. It’s the most comfortable thing I own,” he says. Kiger, 67, is retired from the U.S. Postal Service in Webville, Ky. His mail route took him 122 miles, six days a week for 32 years. For 29 of those, he was in the same pickup. The odometer flipped over 10 times--more than 1 million miles. Ford officials know of no longer-running example than Kiger’s Rangoon Red 1966 pickup. In the course of 6,000 fill-ups and perhaps 71,000 gallons of gasoline, Kiger says he has been faithful to the oldest of all maintenance regimens: “You know, suppose you’re coming down with a cold. You got symptoms, right? Automobiles--same thing.” Early diagnosis has resulted in only four mechanical breakdowns. “And I’m also thinking now it needs repainting,” Kiger says.

In Detroit, Ford officials heard of Kiger and called him for details. Before they could even contemplate the advertising potential of a million-mile truck, Kiger cut them short. He assumed that Ford was about to put the squeeze on him to buy a new pickup, which, of course, he did not need. So he hung up. Back in California, Jim Sparling, a commercial telephone installer from Whittier, was planning a big day. His 1972 Ford F-250 with the Toasted Honey paint had just clocked 399,000 miles. He was daydreaming about being on the steep uphill grade of Poppet Flats Road on the way to Idyllwild when it would hit 400,000. He was thinking about pulling his 5,400-pound fifth-wheel camping trailer, just to show off. “There is no Toyota that can make that grade,” he says, by way of you-know-what-he-means.

But it wasn’t to be. Sparling later admitted he was westbound on the Riverside Freeway in Anaheim when the moment arrived. The only ceremony was his grappling to snap a photograph while driving, but the picture came out showing only his speedometer. Sparling says he isn’t so carefree about maintenance, however. He insists he has changed the oil within 100 miles of every 3,000 since he’s owned the truck. So far, 133 oil changes. Not that he babies his pickup. Why, just the other day, he recalls, “I was at the carwash doing some male-bonding thing with my son. We were doing doughnuts in the parking lot.

“I can still light the tires up,” he says. “I don’t know what it is about frying tires, but it’s fun. The wife, she walked home. I guess pickups are a machismo thing. They say ‘virility.’ Taught my son Mark to drive in this. He’s 28 and got his own pickup now. This one, I intend to pass it on to one of my grandkids. And I don’t have grandkids yet.” Besides doughnuts, there are far greater extremes for pickups: The “monster” truck displays, the new NASCAR pickup truck racing season--the most successful new series in the history of stock car racing--plus any number of off-road competitions, truck pulls, mud-track drag races and custom shows and rallies. Why, sometimes a guy in an ordinary truck seems a downright curiosity.

“It’s a disappointment to some readers who call me seeking divine insight or something,” says Los Angeles Times automotive writer Paul Dean. He tests and reviews all variety of cars, including the greatest, most expensive, fastest and most temperamentally exotic road machines in the world. “People ask me what do I drive? A pickup.”

That is, a 1986 Nissan mini, color red.

The story goes something like this: Dean’s son turns 16. A little pickup seems an economical choice to get him on the road. Then son grows up and dad is left with the truck. By which time dad finds it handy in between BMWs and Land Rovers. “I get a new car every week, so any vehicle that is mine must be prepared to spend 10 months a year in a manufacturer’s parking lot or in front of my house in the acid rain,” Dean explains. “That said, my little truck has been enormously helpful to me. If I had to go out and buy a vehicle, I’d buy a pickup. I’ve become a trucker.” In the early 1900s, the same sort of practical impulse gave rise to the original pickups. Several American manufacturers began producing van-like light trucks in the first decade of the century. The pickup did not arrive until well after car owners had torn the decorative bobtails off their roadsters and attached boxes in their place. The pickup arose not from car makers, but from the farmers and handymen of America who needed them. According to truck historians, the first company to offer a truck called a pickup was International in 1921. Ford followed with its first pickup on April 15, 1925, according to the Henry Ford Museum. It cost $281 and was a standard Model T runabout with a steel box instead of the rear deck. “The pickup is a uniquely American vehicle,” reads the plaque of the museum’s truck display. “And its popularity in other parts of the world has been quite limited.” Over the years, America has produced memorable pickups, some of them all but gone now. In the book “The Great American Pickup Truck,” writer Henry Rasmussen describes the streamlined 1934 Terraplane, made by Hudson Motor Car Co., as the most beautiful pickup ever. Only three are known to exist today. The 1949-1953 Studebaker, another rarity, showed the influence of the famous industrial designer Raymond Loewy. The Dodge Power Wagon, on the other hand, appears destined to rumble along forever, in myth and on the road. It is the most brutishly tough pickup ever made. Just ask people who own one.

Built from the 1940s to 1970s with an oversized stance, platform fenders, a tractor-tire carriage and sheet metal thick as an iron gate, the Power Wagon has devotees today who shame Ford and Chevy aficionados in their unrepentant zeal for the one and only real American pickup. Dave Butler is the titan of Power Wagons. Out back of his shop in Fairfield, Iowa, he has 25 or so in running condition and 200 more from which to salvage parts. He has an additional 400 tons of new parts stocked in warehouses, including 10,000 Army surplus pistons. He sells a refurbished Power Wagon about once a week and buys another ready for reconditioning. Each summer for nine years now, he hosts a rally and show of Power Wagons for fanciers around the world, sometimes including a member of the royal family from the United Arab Emirates. “The word that would describe a Power Wagon is, well, powerful,” says Butler, who long ago ceased to fathom people who didn’t know at least that much. “Men came back from World War II and went home to the farm, and they said they wanted a truck like they had in the South Pacific, or Europe. That’s where it started. The Power Wagon is famous worldwide as the four-wheel-drive that will go anywhere, do anything.” Butler’s personal ’69 Dodge W300, for instance, has a power shaft in the rear, good for running a sawmill or posthole digger. He says he once winched a D8 Caterpillar bulldozer off the flatbed of a transport truck.

Naturally, anything so intertwined with American culture as the pickup creates its own stereotypes, good and awful, which have come to set its image and propel demand for pickups. Most of these cliches are rooted in the Old West or spoken in the Western twang of the New South. In the 1975 film “Rancho Deluxe,” screenwriter Thomas McGuane sketched a scene in which an old man speaks to his son about the dangers of pickup truck temptation in Montana: “I’ve seen more of this state’s poor cowboys, miners, railroaders and Indians go broke buying pickup trucks. The poor people of this state are dope fiends for pickup trucks. As soon as they get 10 cents ahead they trade in on a new pickup truck. The families, homesteads, schools, hospitals and happiness have been sold down the river to buy pickup trucks. There is a sickness here worse than alcohol and dope, and it is the pickup truck debt.” “I see what you mean,” replies the son.

People of means also succumb.

“I never had any interest in motor vehicles or the absurd social constructs surrounding them,” says Van Gordon Sauter, former president of CBS News, now the head of KVIE television in Sacramento.

“Then one day,” he continues, “I went around a curve south of Hailey, Idaho, and saw by the side of the road a forlorn and disheveled pickup, at least one generation old, with a red-and-white For Sale sign in the window. I had an epiphany. That truck had served the yeomen of some family farm for decades without faltering or complaint. It was as American as you could get in design and function, symbol and heritage. I fishtailed to a halt and within hours the pickup was mine. “You cannot improve on the design and breeding of an old pickup. It’s like an honorable hunting dog: It shows up for work, unfailingly follows commands, covers a lot of tough terrain and never, ever, loses its dignity.”

*

If you drive by a junior high school and see 300 kids all wearing baggy blue jeans and ask why, they will tell you they are expressing their individuality. Something of the same is at work with pickup trucks.

In Texas, there are more pickups than anywhere else in America, and Texans will agree that this tells you chapters about the Lone Star state.

“Take the wealthier parts of Houston. People have traded up their Lincolns and Cadillacs for a pickup and a Lexus import,” says David Lantz, an automotive prodigy. At 12 years old, he began publishing a newsletter called Auto Center Monthly. Now, six years later, Lantz is a high school student, pickup truck owner and publisher of the annual “Lantz’s Automotive Almanac.” “For us, the pickup expresses Texas in a lot of different ways. Here you can walk downtown, in a city of 3 million, with a cowboy hat and nobody looks at you funny. There’s a deep agricultural tradition, lots of rodeo, and kids grow up in families that cannot imagine anything else except a pickup. That’s the way I am, I can’t imagine having anything else. Wouldn’t know what to do.” The Texas pickup is “lifted,” not lowered in the style of California. “People here look at one of those lowered trucks, and they say, ‘Well, shut my mouth. What’s the point?’ ” says Lantz. The official Texas truck would also have four-wheel-drive, oversize wheels and tires, a brush guard over the grille like industrial dental braces, add-on halogen lights fastened as high and as many as possible, an outside toolbox and an optional roll bar. Beyond that, you can add your own touches, such as Lantz’s horn that plays “Dixie,” his 4-foot CB aerial and an $8 spring “hat jack” on the ceiling of the cab for holding his cowboy hat. In this age of cross-culturalism, however, there are plenty of California-style trucks in Texas, with their dazzling graphic paint jobs and flashy wheels. And more are coming. Hot Rod custom car designer Boyd Coddington of Stanton, Calif., has licensed his name to a Texas company to produce a “Boyd-look” California pickup--lowered, with custom wheels and fancy paint. This for the customer who cannot afford $100,000 for an all-out Coddington original. And as any commuter knows, there are plenty of high-rise Texas-style trucks in California, both on the road and tearing hell out of desert washes, although “off road” has lost some of its cachet owing to political and environmental concerns. Off-pavement is the preferred term for those who insist. On-roader David Molina is the proud possessor of an original Marlboro promotional truck, purchased secondhand from the cigarette manufacturer--a fire-red 1993 Chevy Silverado, 4WD, V8, chrome roll bar, fog lights, brush guard and a two-inch lift, which he drives each Friday from his home in Rancho Cucamonga to his studio in Glendale, where he is vice president of Creative Capers Entertainment, a computer animation company. He thought about buying a lowered California truck, but then knew he would worry about getting such a pretty thing scratched. Besides, he and his partners created cartoon characters called the Studman Brothers, triplet backyard mechanics who liked their trucks to resemble something between a pickup and an earthmover. “This truck is an extension of that fantasy. It’s a truck that says, ‘Go ahead and dent me.’ ” And no, he has not yet used the four-wheel drive.

Even the Japanese are feeling the pickup craze. Taku Nakasaka is one of several, perhaps more, businessmen who comb Southern California buying up the best fully accessorized California-look pickups and shipping them to Japan. Demand began early in the decade and has grown since. Nakasaka now sends as many as 15 trucks a month to customers in Japan who “mostly are buying the American fashion.” “It used to be Corvettes, but I hardly ship any of those now. A full-size pickup is really too big for Japan, so it’s just for weekends. And they’re not for carrying things, except maybe a big audio system in the bed.”

*

A blank slate, that’s what makes pickups irresistible to customizing. Even with the smoother lines of today, the pickup remains reliably recognizable from year to year. But maybe not forever.

“Completely new types of vehicles are starting to break the surface: cars that look like trucks, and trucks that act like cars,” says Ford’s Roberts. “Subcompact sport utility vehicles, open vehicles and specialized off-road concept vehicles are also starting to emerge.” Ford’s idea of this crossbreed future is the Adrenalin, a hybrid concept pickup-car-SUV with muscular fenders, fat tires, full-size cabin, four doors and a shortened bed. The interior is waterproof so it can be cleaned with a hose. And the center console can be detached and carried as a backpack. Some Ford executives believe the market is ready and that an Adrenalin-like hybrid should be put into production. But some outside experts worry that Detroit is inherently conservative when it comes to the cherished pickup, and that the Japanese, by being first to bring out such a vehicle, may finally get a breakthrough into this market.

“I think the Japanese are going to beat them to it. They’re more aggressive and they have shorter development times for new products,” says Kevin Boales, technical editor for pickups at McMullen/Argus Publishing, which produces Truckin’ and seven other pickup truck magazines. All of which is of little mind to those who have already found what they want in the pickup.

The other day in Pomona, Ted Stone, a taciturn machinist from Colton with a gray beard to his waist, drove into the fairgrounds in a 1951 Dodge pickup, original red paint, faded now to the color of a dying tomato.

“More versatile, I guess,” he says about his choice of vehicles. As he stops, four attractive and casually dressed middle-age women rise from the bed behind him.

Now, really, the passengers are asked as they vault over the side and steady themselves, wouldn’t they rather that old Ted had the good sense to drive a station wagon?

“We like the truck,” replies one. The others nod agreement, and all walk off at Stone’s side.

By now, it should be apparent that some matters involving pickups must be taken on faith and may have to do with urges not suitable for prying.

Lastly, there is Tanja Burton, a Lancaster horse trainer and runner-up Miss Rodeo Antelope Valley. She is having a Coke with Brandy DeJongh, a high school student and the reigning Miss Rodeo Antelope Valley. Burton has a big F-250 three-quarter-ton 1995 Ford blue and white pickup; DeJongh drives a 1995 white F-350 4-by-4, the biggest pickup in the Ford line. They offer youth’s always earnest perspective: DeJongh: “It’s attitude. A truck gives you confidence.”

Burton: “I like looking down on people.”

DeJongh: “You can go anywhere, do anything.”

Burton: “We’re not just some sissy girls driving a Honda.”

DeJongh: “We’re the real thing, you know, cowgirls, we really do those things.”

Burton: “There is something men like about women in pickups.”

Yes, and pickups are just so handy, too.