Have I destroyed any small hope of being taken seriously as an automotive historian? I’ll let you decide. But after the blunders I made in trying to help my friend Nick unravel the provenance of his little utility trailer that he picked up a couple of months ago for $100, my self confidence is as damaged as the Chevy emblem that once graced its oddly smooth tailgate. How could I have screwed up so badly? Now a very rare piece of automotive history (and likely worth several time what Nick paid for the trailer) has been rent asunder.
I met Nick at the beginning of this summer when I was shooting his awesome ’65 Dodge Town Panel, which will be featured here one of these days/months/years. It’s a work in progress, and I keep putting it off until the next phase of its evolution. Soon.
Nick is something of a free spirit, roaming the wilds of the high desert when not planning and implementing improvements to his truck.. He sent me this selfie just a couple of hours ago, behind the wheel of his truck and wearing a porcupine skin “hat” he fashioned from a road kill. But for almost three months, Nick lived with us and helped me during my busy summer re-rental/maintenance season, as well as other tasks around the Casa Niedermeyer.
Such as shelling beans from Stephanie’s garden. A more charming, insightful, intelligent and helpful house guest would be hard to imagine. He made a challenging summer perpetually fun. That is a huge gift.
So when he showed up one week with this cute little trailer, you might think that I might have returned the favor by giving it my undivided attention in determining its true provenance. I didn’t. It probably had to do with the fact that it really was a very demanding time: 65 days of hard work without a day off. Here’s how it all unfolded instead:
Nick had rightfully already identified the fenders as being from a Ford F-1. He showed me images from Google on his phone that convinced him. I should have looked a bit harder, and at more than just the fender, which clearly is from an F-1.
So Nick naturally assumed that the whole bed was from an F-1. And it was easier to just go along with that line of reasoning. Sure; someone made a trailer out of an F-1 bed.
And Nick did not like the Chevy emblem on the tailgate. It seemed jarring and inconsistent to see it on a Ford bed. Nick assumed that a previous owner had a Chevy truck, and wanted the trailer to match. Sure; makes sense.
We conveniently ignored the odd smooth tailgate “cover”, and instead put our attention on the odd taillights. We were stumped by them, and since I was so busy/tired, I put it out to you all to solve the mystery of their origins.
Not surprisingly, the (correct) answer came soon, from occam24, who pegged them as being from a ’57-’60 Ford panel truck, which coincidentally was a direct competitor to Nick’s Town Panel. And these tail lights are worth $200+. Nick had already made a 100% profit on his investment.
Now this all happened pretty early on after the trailer first appeared. Having satisfied himself that the trailer was a Ford, even if the lights were from a different model, Nick decided that the Chevy emblem on the tailgate had to go. Nick is not a Chevy guy, and it jarred his very particular aesthetic sensibility.
I casually assumed that the tailgate cover, made of fiberglass, was some kind of aftermarket piece, which I have seen on the back of custom stepside pickups over the years.
Something like this one for a Ford Flareside bed, which clean up the back end.
I told Nick the Chevy emblem was probably just slapped on with some kind of glue/mastic, and he started prying at it with a flat bar. It was NOT coming off.
If we had given these indentations on the inside of the tailgate, in which two machine bolt heads were ensconced, more careful consideration, we might have realized why this emblem was not coming off easily. These were not aftermarket indentations.
The other great mystery was why the backside of the stamped-in F O R D logo wasn’t on the inside of the tailgate. What the?? Is this some kind of dual-wall tailgate?
Nick took off one or two of the screws on the bottom edge of the fiberglass cover, enough to peer up into it with a flashlight. There was no second wall, and there was no logo at all. An American pickup tailgate without a logo embossed into the tailgate??
In my (weak) defense, I was a bit preoccupied with other matters when Nick determined to remove the bowtie. He borrowed my Sawzall, and cut the two bolts And showed me the results. There clearly were two brackets spot welded onto the steel tailgate that protruded out to the fiberglass cover, to properly support the emblem. This was not just some Chevy lover’s crude way to show his bowtie love. What was going on here? Something kept nagging at me, but I just wouldn’t properly allocate the preoccupied brain cells to plunge a bit deeper. Hey, it’s Nick’s toy; what do I really care? I’ve got real work to attend to…
Nick went off somewhere for a few days, and when he returned, he was excited to show me something about the trailer, something incredibly obvious that we both had overlooked: These Ford fenders were added later; the original mounting holes and the residue of the mastic or sealant where they attached to the trailer were all-too obvious. Doh!! How could we have missed these earlier?
By this time, the intense seasonal work was over, and I finally determined to unravel the mystery. Starting with the sudden memory recall that all Ford Flareside beds have flared tops on the sides, that jut out at something like a 45° angle, as seen in the ones further up. And a quick Google at Dodge beds showed the same thing. And IH too! But this bed’s side tops (sills) were perfectly flat. Who did that?
Chevrolet! The lights finally lit up, although only partially. This is obviously a Chevy bed! Brilliant.
The distinctive GM pattern of narrow, medium, and wide boards in the bed floor sealed the deal.
But…what about that blank tailgate, its fiberglass cover, and that bowtie on the back?
The only thing I could come up with (again) was a custom tailgate of some sort, as they are readily available. But something still didn’t jive.
Those two bolts that held the emblem on, for one. And what were these two unusual indented devices, attached to the inside sides of the tailgate. They had no apparent function, and the hook eye in each one looked less than original. And hooking the chain to them made the tailgate droop down some, less than the usual level. Anyway, there were those typical hooks on the side for that purpose. Hmmm. This tailgate was clearly not a normal Chevy tailgate, yet it was also not just a custom aftermarket unit either.
This riddle needed to be solved. I dug deeper into the old gray matter for an answer. Nick and I sat at my computer, having solved part of the puzzle, but not the key one.
Suddenly….a thought arose from the depths of the muddle, of a Chevy pickup that I once adored as a kid, but had not thought about in decades.
Cameo! Chevrolet Cameo carrier, to be specific, the first smooth-side pickup ever. Googles furiously…And there it is, the bowtie emblem on the back! Damn! Why didn’t I think of it sooner? It’s all so obvious now.
No less than Chuck Jordan came up with the idea for the Cameo, after a stint in the Air Force, stationed at Cape Canaveral, where he was inspired by guided missile carriers to start sketching pickups with a full width box.
Jordan wanted an integrated cab-bed, without any break, like Ford would eventually do with its 1961 “slick” pickups. GM’s engineers (rightly) vetoed that, saying that such a large unbroken expanse of flat steel would wrinkle from the frame flex of a truck. The compromise was a separate full-width bed, with a piece of chrome between the cab and bed.
I knew that the Cameo did not have a true full-width bed; Chevy just used the regular bed and added fiberglass panels on the sides to give the appearance so desired. And of course the tailgate had a smooth steel inner panel, and that fiberglass cover. And those two shiny indented things in the tailgate are the latches, with recessed handles. And there was a clever spring-loaded cable that was attached to the sides of the tailgate. Nick’s trailer had a Cameo tailgate! Mystery solved. How could I not have thought of the Cameo from the get-go? It’s all so obvious…now.
The Cameo was built in modest numbers between 1955 – 1958, when Chevy introduced the all-steel Fleetside tailgate.
Nick did a little research, and it turns out that Cameo tailgates sell for several hundred dollars, or more. Even just the tailgate emblem can fetch a couple of hundred bucks.
Of course, his is now a little bit worse for my stupidity. Why would someone stick a Chevy emblem on the back of a Ford pickup bed…Oh, that’ll just come off with a bar…
I have only one small consolation: none of you recognized that it was a Chevy bed and a Cameo tailgate either.
Wow, what a puzzle. Don’t beat yourself up, this was a tricky one. Odd with mismatching fenders; had it been a fleetside box with the side panels stripped off, or a regular bed with a transplanted tailgate? And why Ford fenders? Truly odd.
Up in farm country Manitoba you see the occasional pickup-box-turned-trailer around. I think most I’ve seen are from ’70s pickups, though, not ’50s.
So it’s a little bit of a “Franken-trailer”?
Seems like someone went through a lot of work (Ford taillights, tailgate that doesn’t belong to that bed…) when it would have been easier to find a more complete bed and make a trailer of it.
It would be interesting to know how the original creator came to his solutions.
I would have thought exactly as you did, and I think most people would have, too – you need to be a Cameo geek to recognize this. But if he really wants to sell it, I’d say it’s still possible to rectify…
Looking at the last pic of the Concours Cameo leads to another taillight puzzle. I’d always ass-u-me-d that the Cameo reused ’54 sedan taillights. Nope. The picture makes it clear. Not the same bezel, not the same lens.
Why? I think GM simply enjoyed one-upping the competition. “Ha ha ha. We don’t have to amortize molds and dies like you little losers do. We can make an entirely new part that looks almost the same as the original, just to prove that we have more money than God.”
That gave me a chuckle, thanks!
Oh the humiliation of false surmises! Just last week I thought my A/C was going south, only to realize later that the temperature setting was up partway from the bottom. I deserve this username: ID10T!
Damn your good, Paul! I did at the start of reading this think that it could be a tailgate from a Cameo after seeing the bow tie and then reading that it had a fiberglass skin. But too little too late, you already figured it out. I wouldn’t say your slipping at all!
About 12 years ago I saw a trailer made out of a ’68-72 Chevy bed, it even still had the complete rear end assembly in it. It was dented everywhere except the tailgate, which was missing from my old truck. Tailgates were hard to find and not cheap. Got the whole trailer for sixty bucks. I put the tailgate on my truck, made a plywood tailgate for it and sold it for $100. Got my tailgate and made a profit.
Until I saw the second picture of Nick I thought he had a 4 point harness in the old truck!
Great little detective story–and a chance to get to know Nick, too. I remember the “tail light” column earlier this summer, and wondered if Nick had sold them off yet for ready cash, but the story really unraveled today, and I thank you for sharing, Paul.
In my own researcher/historian world, I just had something fall into place last week, using puzzle pieces I’d had since the 1990s, but only finally reconciled somehow. “It’s all so obvious now” is VERY apt—just as everything (like, say, the way to design and build a smooth-running & reliable internal combusion engine) becomes obvious in retrospect.
(BTW, that bowtie badge–in all the pictures posted earlier–never struck me as a factory item; it seemed to have a klunky, J.C. Whitney sort of look about it. Still, I’m surprised that GM never reused the part on a commercial truck, etc.)
This reminds me of buying old woodworking planes. Sometimes a seller, usually an antiques dealers will have an old plane for sale. They’ll have a no name plane body with a Stanley blade, a Millers Falls lever cap and non matching handles. The price tag reads Millers Falls plane because the name on the lever cap is most visible. Only when you investigate further do you realize that it is a Franken plane made up of parts and worth not nearly what they are asking for it. Nice piece of detective work. That Cameo gate is hard to recognize in a different application.
You’d need to have heard of or seen a Cameo pickup to identify it first off, I had’nt until just now. I like Nicks panel van can we have more on that?
I like Nick’s eye tattoo – can we have more on that? 😉
Among other things, it’s a very effective filter. Folks who are put off by it are not the kind of folks he’d likely want to associate with anyway.
Getting a tour of Nicks many tattoos is like a curated walk through a small museum. There’s even a perfectly rendered TransVan. It played a role in one of his adventures. More when we do a CC on his truck.
https://www.curbsideclassic.com/blog/cc-capsule-1978-dodge-trans-van-440-powered/
Just wow. But it makes perfect sense. Is the entire bed frame Cameo, or a regular Stepside bed with the Cameo tailgate and Ford fenders bolted on?
Now that I think of it, I’ll bet the Cameo and Stepside bedframes are exactly identical.
Presumably it’s a Stepside bed, because of the fender mounting holes in it. And yes, the basic beds are the same.
Paul, you deserve a lot of credit for figuring out this one!
Here’s a ’57 Cameo we followed around on Chincoteague Island, Virginia 4 years ago.
Wow, I never would have guessed it. I noticed that the top edges of the sides were flat and not the 45 degree angle of Ford beds of the time, but I knew that later Fords went to flat-top sides and figured that it was just a newer Ford bed with old Ford fenders. Bzzzzt – wrong.
Wow. Good job unraveling that puzzler! Very interesting mix of parts and I would love to know how it all came together, though I’m sure that’s a mystery lost to time.
Also it’s quite a stroke of luck that Nick has several hundred dollars’ profit in parts that could be cheaply replaced. If he doesn’t value the originality more, that is!
Good job, fellas! That was a bit of an automotive puzzle…
This trailer reminds me of one my dad bought somewhere for next to nothing because it needed new (16″) tires or something. It was all-steel and quite small, but had a VERY strong solid axle and leaf springs.
The last time I saw it was when he and the whole family still at home moved from Ohio to Virginia in 1982. I think he had a small riding lawnmower in it.
Paul, an excellent story, building up the suspense, whodunnit style, as you attempt to unravel the mystery. I will say that I finally guessed Cameo a few lines before you revealed the answer. The process of elimination plus the fact that the Chevy logo did seem factory-attached finally left no other option.
SO…what is under it? It’s not riding on a cut-off Cameo frame and axle…is it?
No, it’s got a little welded-up frame, which makes for a much lighter trailer than using the original truck frame and axle. It has a dropped axle and leaf springs; I don’t know what the axle is from, and I’m not about to try to find out. 🙂
It’s probably from an Auto Union Grand Prix car?
Don’t beat yourself up sir!
You get so much right, you are allowed a miss once in a while!
Nick is so cool! Met him in portal land Oregon with his huge pit named rhino and he had a rattlesnake. Love this story! He adds good to everyone he crosses paths with