A little bit back, I gave you a look through the pages of a long-forgotten book , “American Trucking, a 75-Year Odyssey,” by Robert M. Roll. It was published 30 years ago and it’s still a treat. Here’s a couple more images for all of us who remember this industry’s past so fondly.
This one kind of expresses what Hemmings could become some day, you never know, a home for presentation and retrospective on transport history in all its forms. Let’s peg this image at the mid-1950s. It shows a straight-frame  Ford COE operated by Gordons – no apostrophe – on the waterfront in Mobile, Alabama. Gordons was a big mid-South firm based in Memphis. I’ve never been to Mobile but this salty scene makes me want to get there.
That outgrowth spreading from the cab of this 1948 GMC cabover is a homemade fuel tank. Imagine trying to get his on the roads today. The sheetmetal work was performed in the shops of John F. Ivory, a major household-goods mover that ran out of Detroit for many years. The founder’s son, Jack Ivory, who passed away in 2004, was incidentally a world-ranked polo player.
Also from Detroit is this 1933 view of the way new cars were delivered in lots of four, which was a very big deal back then. The cars are Dodges. The truck tractor, operated by Square Deal Cartage of Detroit, is likewise a Dodge, gasoline fueled. Changes in federal overall-length laws eventually rendered combinations like this one obsolete.
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