In the Ranchero CC yesterday, the point that pickups were considered work vehicles and not welcome on suburban driveways was reiterated in the comments. And then I stumbled into this parking lot shot from the 1969 Chicago Auto Show. it’s a sea of mostly big domestic sedans and wagons, and one Chevy pickup. I’m also quite surprised at the lack of VW Beetles; I see one VW bus and a Karman-Ghia. Well, this is Chicago, and in cities, pickups were much less common than in a small rural town. But it still shows how the mix has changed.
I spy a beetle in the sixth row, second car from the left. Pickups are still comparatively rare here in Chicago; it was one of the first things I noticed when I moved here from St. Paul, MN.
The lack of Beetles or even domestic compacts is probably a reflection of what I’ve long experienced at our local new auto show. When you go with your buddy, you tend to take your biggest, best, newest or funnest car. If you take the whole family, you need the big car space, or its a family event and again you take your best car.
At our boat sports and travel show, the crew cab F-150 fills 1/3 of all parking spots. That familiar triangular side tail light sometimes is literally in 5 or 6 consecutive spots, broken by a few others, and can start up yet again.
VWs aside, really no foreign cars, not even an MG which I’d think would be part of the car-guy demographic even then. Only 1 SUV, a full size Wagoneer, but at least one passenger van (a Chevy) and maybe another in the distance ( or is that another VW bus?). But I do see at least two cargo vans, so there are some work vehicles.
PS I like these kind of pictures.
Edit: On closer examination, I see a Saab sort of in front of tbe VW bus, and what I think is a Toyota Corona in the 5th row by a Caddy, looking very narrow.
I was a young child around this time, and the sheer volume of large, rusty Detroit Iron turned me off big cars then. Plus all the bad air in the cities. Even as full-sized cars became more efficient, I continued to prefer mid-sized or smaller cars.
Isn’t that a Marlin in the front row?
I’m thinking Chevelle. Marlin had a more rounded trailing edge to the side window profile.
The Marlin has a more rounded rear window
That’s what I thought at first, too. But, I think Don is correct.
I believe pickup trucks, whatever it’s based on, should be welcome wherever there’s a need for a large bed to carry stuff that a station wagon can’t.
More surprising: No older cars. In the “readable” rows I see one ’59 Ford and one ’59 Chevy. Aside from those, everything is >=1960.
I try to make a habit of taking wide shots of the various cars in parking lots, in hopes of looking back at them in future years. Maybe in the future we’ll be directly transmitting Curbside Classic to readers’ brains.
Karman Ghia!
My dad owned a gold 1969 Ford Ranch Wagon like the one in the lower left corner of the photo. By 1974, it was already severly rusted. Even though he used to wash it regularly in winter.
Man looking at the cars in the parking lots were a lot more fun and interesting back in the 1960’s/1970’s than they are today, I see a ’66 full size Pontiac (probably a Star Chief or a Bonneville)
At least it is a real pickup, with 2 doors. And I wonder how many 2 door cars were in that lot compared to 4 doors?
Appears to be a fair number of “traditional” station wagons. Driving around a local shopping center a week before Christmas I noticed a very large number of SUVs. “Crossovers” are slowly usurping the older bof type SUVs as THE vehicle of choice for women….especially “housewives”.
I’m even considering an older Mercury Mountaineer now that gas is getting to be so cheap.
I remember back when I first started driving in the ’60’s, nobody drove a pickup except for work. My grandpa always had a truck for work or fishing, but I bet my grandma never rode in it. My Dad had a pickup for his business but kept a second car to drive to work. No one at my high school drove a pickup to school except the Agriculture teacher who had a very fancy, for the time, Chevy.
As silly as it sounds now, I was amazed one time that my dad actually drove the pickup to visit my aunt and uncle 250 miles away. It was even a brand new ’67 Ford F150.
Little did I know that off in the future my wife and I would drive my ’95 Ranger short bed to the west coast to move our daughter back and think nothing of it.
Nice photo ! .
I can spend some time looking at it close up .
-Nate
Most likely the reason you see no p/u trucks is the roads leading to the auto show are No Trucks roads . The major one being Lake Shore Drive . You can not even drive a Subaru Brat since it carrys a truck plate
Here’s another way the mix has changed, virtually every vehicle visible is no older than 8 or 9 years. I think I see one late ’50s vehicle in the whole lot.
It was still very unusual for people to drive pick-ups or any light truck-based vehicle as daily transportation as late as the 1980s, at least in or around cities. I worked at a large big city Ford dealer for a couple of years in the mid ’80s while waiting for my real career to open up (it did, thank goodness), and I remember that making a sale on a new pick-up truck was a fantasy of the entire commissioned sales force due to their much greater profit margin compared to automobiles. However, a retail sale of a light truck was a rarity. In fact, I don’t recall one being sold by anyone other than occasionally by the fleet or commercial sales people. I also remember the few units we kept in stock tended to be very basic and sparsely equipped, as were most pick-ups of that era (a rear bumper was an extra charge, dealer installed option, for example). They were obviously intended for work duty, not everyday use.
The attraction of those high profit margins and regulation loopholes in the light-truck market prompted the auto makers to come up with ways to push pick-up based vehicles into the hands of image-conscious mainstream retail customers in the 1990s. They were pleasantly surprised to find that millions of people whose self-image wouldn’t allow themselves to be caught dead in a car-based “station wagon” would pay far more for a heavier, less efficient light-truck based station wagon, as long as you called it an “SUV” instead of a “station wagon” (and later, a “crossover”). It was pure marketing genius.
Revealing picture and at odds with what I remember. How can a street be blocked to pickups. Some very revealing comments but that is just a stupid thing to do.
I bought my first truck in 1970. It was a 69 C10. I wasn’t trying to start anything I just needed to carry my bike. Even back then it became a real bummer to pour gas through that thing. Later as a serviceman I found that a truck or van was the best deal. A four door station wagon with a small trailer would have been fine but the Houston area customers would never have taken me seriously. The suburban or IHC equivalent were the only SUVs I remember and by then it was 1981.
Advantages? Yup, quite a few. Disadvantages, just as many. If I am to have one work truck now it will probably always be an SUV with a trailer for the dirty or bulky stuff.
What I remember is that the only people who had pickups were people who had a “camper special” pickup and a camper to put on it for their hunting trips. For SUVs back then people had their choice of: Jeep Wagoneer, Chevy Suburban, International Travelall(or was it carryall?), Ford Bronco, International scout, Plymouth Trailmaster(?), Chevy Blazer, AMC Eagle station wagon, various oddball jeeps, and Dodge Ramcharger.
My family ran a golf course – my cousins still do – and back in the late 60s / early 70s, my uncle, who was the Superintendent, drove a bare bones ’68 Coronet wagon followed by a base ’73 Polara wagon (rear carpet delete) as his “work car”. (His fun car was a ’73 911 in “Raspberry!)
We had a couple of D-series pickups at the course, along with a D-500 dump truck, but we – and – he, only ever used the trucks for personal use when we needed to pick up something big, heavy, or dirty.
I’m wondering if the lack of foreign cars in the lot reflects a combination of the more personalized nature of foreign car purchases back in the day, the lower profile of many foreign brands, and the general lack of annual model changes for most foreign cars – you knew what your brand offered, and it was more likely than not what they’d offered the year before.
I think I see another pickup in the back.
That Divco-looking milk truck looks out of place!
I’d love more info on that pic. It looks like it was taken not long before the Bears took to Soldier Field.
You have to be looking for them, but I’ve seen several towns and cities with “truck routes”. Certain streets and roads were/are “truck exclusion routes” because the streets are narrow and/or the neighborhoods aren’t truck friendly. The impetus for most city bypasses is the truck traffic. Nothing ruins your day more than being stuck behind a slow moving truck.
Having been born and raised in Chicago I have lived through Chicago’s archaic motor vehicle code laws as having owned many pick- up trucks including both personal and commercial .Still to this day you can not drive any pick-up down a drive or boulevard or even park on a side street by your home without some regulations (.Municipal codes 9-72-020 and 9-64-170) In 1969 you would of also have had to get your p/u safety tested and stickered regardless of its use at your own expense . Also your name ,city and gross weight would need to be displayed on both sides or risk a possible ticket. Even today I can drive a Ford Excursion (car plate) down Lake Shore Drive but not a 2wd Ranger since it carries truck plates ! That is why I live in a suburb of Chicago were many pick-ups reside in front of homes without a permit to park and can be driven all over the town in which there are no restrictions .
I read up on this law that chicago has. I am surprised that nobody has challenged it as being unconstitutional. It is discriminatory as the wording assumes that you must be a workman/workwoman if you drive a pickup truck. Yet vans are allowed to drive freely. In Maryland most contractors/tradespeople/commercial drive vans.
According to a Chicago DOT spokesperson, the law dates back to the 1800’s when they decided that some roads should be for pleasure drives in your Brougham.
I’d like to see a comparison test of say a late 60s Buick Electra 225 and Chevy Silverado 1500 crew cab. Ride, handling, braking, nvh, fuel economy, usability as a family vehicle, etc. I’d wager the truck would win easily, so there has been considerable progress in a trucks suitability for family duty.
Trucks are very popular here in the Carolinas (big surprise), but having driven Ford Rangers, F150s, and Chevy Suburbans for years with my employer, I’d never own a vehicle that had such running costs and dynamic compromises. I cringe everytime I see a new teen driver in a late 90s / early 00s Ranger or half ton pickup. Bad, bad, bad idea, but thats what the young men want.
At least where I grew up, in the heart of the suburban Philadelphia area, it started to change pretty quickly. By 73 when I joined Boy Scouts, my Scoutmaster had a Scout II as his daily driver (he was a mechanic), though his wife did drive a Mopar fuselage wagon (Sattelite?). At least two of the other Scouts’ dads drove recent F100s, and AFAIK neither needed a truck for work.
In the early 70’s a lot of the kids in HS drove pickup’s and El Camino’s. In 73 I drove a 65 Chevy C10. But the teacher’s lot had no pickup’s that I remember. The one Beetle I see in the picture appears to be a convertible.
The pickup boom that occurred after the 1980s was a result of a number of factors. First, CAFE standards were causing cars to shrink and the switch to uni-bodies and front drive was making cars less durable and harder to repair for do-it-yourselfers.
Second, the tax laws allowed a person to write off depreciation of “commercial” vehicles sooner.
And third, “commercial” vehicles lasted longer and had better resale value.
There was a time when the biggest top of the line station wagon would haul or tow about the same as a light duty white-wall-tire-wearing half ton pickup and likely had a helluva lot more engine. This all changed in the 1980s. The days of putting a bumper hitch on your 8 passenger Ford LTD country squire station wagon and pulling a big camper or a flatbed trailer were over. Large families had to either move up to a conversion van or a Chevy Suburban outfitted with car-like luxuries. Arguably, the minivan replaced the 8passenger station wagon to some degree. But the minivan was not the hauling/towing beast that the old 400+ cubic inch V8 engined, body-on-frame constructed, 8 passenger dragon wagon was.
While in Southern California last week we both noted how few full-size pickup trucks there were on the roads compared to here in Northern Colorado. Presumably it’s a city/traffic/coastal thing with the recent high price of gas in CA helping out as well. However, traveling back while driving eastbound through California we noticed how many older Toyota/Nissan/Mitsubishi minitrucks were still roaming the roadways with a few older Ford Rangers as well but no S-10s. By the time we hit Arizona we stopped seeing the mini-trucks though and by New Mexico they were but a distant memory.
Sadly the S-10 seems to have not really held up at all across the board. The first generation rusted out and the second generation had headgasket issues with the 4 cylinder version(hello 2.2l) and strange issues with the V6 versions. The V6 was so shoehorned into that truck that the oil filter was actually mounted off the block and connected to the engine via two oil lines which always leaked(I replaced many of those likes in the Blazer and S-10 when I worked at the dealer) then there the strange case of the truck over heating simply if you left little door to access the oil filter opened while driving.
I graduated from high school in 1969 and it was really, really rare to see a pickup truck in our high school parking lot. I remember one person from that era who drove a truck as his (more or less) everyday vehicle, and this was a truck that belonged to his grandfather, who had a farm. The only pickup I remember on our block belonged to Mr. Gish, who was a painting contractor. He had an ancient F100 that was seemingly held together by all of the paint spatter on it; this truck was definitely a work tool, he had a new Caprice as his “regular” car.
Trucks make sense if you need them but most of them I see on the road are being used as tall cars with open air trunks. I had an F150 for several years back in the late nineties; it was an excellent vehicle, if rather thirsty. I finally realized that 99% of the time the only thing I was carrying in the bed was air, so decided it was time to move on.
I still have a ’70 Camper Special F-250. It’s not enjoyable to drive. It’s slow, noisy, rough riding, no AC, just something you don’t want to spend much time in. Trips to the dump and the lumber yard are about it these days. New trucks are like a car, no punishment.
There wasn’t much import penetration of the mid west 45 years ago. It was between 5 and 10% of total sales. So you won’t see much foreign iron in a parking lot back then.
Import Vehicle Market Penetration depended on where you lived back then ~ I lived in New England in the 1960’s and the major cities were all jammed with Imports , especially in College Towns .
Even in Rural Hew Hampshire there were scads of Imports, mostly inexpensive VW’s but also plenty of MG’s , Volvos and Saabs , even a BMW occasionally .
-Nate