Now there’s something you don’t see every day

I did a double-take recently when driving past a rural driveway near the National Road in western Indiana. There were two Studebaker trucks sitting in a driveway undergoing long-term work. Now there’s something you don’t see every day!

Back in the day Indiana was a powerhouse industrial state where dozens of major and minor automobile companies made cars and trucks. The biggest Indiana-based car company was Studebaker.

The Studebaker brothers began building farm wagons in 1852 from their blacksmith shop in South Bend

The Studebaker brothers began building farm wagons in 1852 from their blacksmith shop in South Bend. From there they expanded into carriage and wagons, supplying many to the Union side in the Civil War. Studebaker wagons accompanied the restless westward movement into the Great Plains and beyond.

By the time of the Centennial Exposition, Studebaker was the largest maker of horse-drawn vehicles in the world. Studebaker began making automobiles in 1901 with gasoline and electric models, and was the third largest automaker in 1903. After a brief stint at a plant in Detroit in the 1910s, manufacturing returned permanently to South Bend in 1920.

Studebaker and its suppliers brought growth and prosperity to the northern Indiana city that lasted for years.

For the 1927 model year, Studebaker introduced the President, Commander, and Dictator series. They were solid and handsome by the standards of those years, helping the company maintain market share in a cutthroat world. They blended in with the classic 1930s lines and grills. In this author’s opinion, 1933-1937 was the apex years of flowing, functional lines and distinctive looks. Not until the late 1960s did auto styling reach another peak.

Studebaker, like many manufacturers, stumbled in the dark years of the 1930s

Studebaker, like many manufacturers, stumbled in the dark years of the 1930s. They added a heavy truck line and began to make trucks of all sizes. When the Second World War came along, the US government assigned production tasks to American companies. Ford built B-24 bombers, GM built everything from rifles to trucks, Chrysler built tanks and major components of the B-29 bomber, and Studebaker made tracked Weasels, aircraft engines, and trucks. Under Lend-Lease, large numbers of Studebaker trucks went to the Soviet Union, and these dependable trucks continued in service to the Soviets for many years after the war. The distinctive sloping windshield makes them easy to spot.

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During the war and afterward, all of those mighty Studebaker trucks came from South Bend, Indiana

Packard bought Studebaker in 1954, but failed to turn a profit with the company for the next four years. Production of Packards ended in 1958 while Studebaker continued. Although often innovative, Studebaker began to decline as its market share shrank in the late 1950s. When it introduced an economical compact in 1958, profits soared, but the bigger carmakers introduced compacts, too, and the decline resumed. A personal favorite, the Gran Turismo Hawk, came out in 1962. In black, it’s sleek and looks fast, even when standing still. In 1963 the sleek Avanti debuted, taking everyone by surprise. With the look of a European sports car, it came too late to save Studebaker. Production moved to Hamilton, Ontario for a couple of years, then ceased altogether. In the 1980s when I lived in South Bend, the city was just beginning to recover from the shock of losing Studebaker more than twenty years before. The buildings and infrastructure were still there, but deteriorating rapidly. The decline known as the Rust Belt still gripped the entire region, from Chicago to Detroit to Cleveland to Pittsburgh to Cincinnati to St. Louis. In many ways it still does.

When I lived in Bloomington, Indiana in 1973, a kindly older woman lived across the hallway whose husband had worked for and retired from Studebaker in South Bend. We made crabapple jelly one summer and I asked her some questions. She told me that in the last years her husband told of people at the South Bend Studebaker plant who would clock in, leave for work somewhere else during the day, then return and clock out at quitting time. That and many other factors proved fatal for the storied Studebaker line.

During the war and afterward, all of those mighty Studebaker trucks came from South Bend, Indiana, Of course, there’s a family connection, too. My grandfather, who worked for Chrysler, drove a 1951 Studebaker truck to work for the last several years of his employment. It looked just like this one, with the cream and red grille and painted bumpers. I never thought to ask him why he didn’t drive a Dodge. He did say he had owned a Plymouth truck in the 1930s for a while. I had never heard of such a thing. I could admire my grandfather’s facility with a manual transmission before I could operate one myself. To be a man, I understood that it was something I’d have to learn one day, so my dad taught me on the same truck a few years later. Real men know how to operate a manual transmission. Real farm women do, too!

I took many memorable rides in it with my grandfather

It had a six-cylinder Champion engine and a three-speed manual transmission, geared very low so, as my dad said, it was not fast, but could pull a house. The transmission would whine and it seemed to barely move in low gear. I think the top speed must not have been much more than 40MPH. The starter button was under the clutch so it could not be started with the clutch engaged to cause sudden movement. About 1962 my grandfather repainted it red, using a broom and a very large paint brush. You could tell. My oldest brother took our dog in the cab of the truck to A&W and ordered a root beer for himself and one for the dog, to the surprise of the carhop. When it arrived on the window tray, he sat the mug on the floor and the dog lapped it right down. We laughed about that story many times.

I took many memorable rides in it with my grandfather. We went fishing south of the farm in Flat Rock River. We went to visit relatives west of town. We took broilers to the dressing plant at Sulphur Springs. Best of all, we took the truck to the Farm Bureau elevator and feed mill, referenced in last week’s column, for chicken feed and farm supplies. For a few years in the 1950s feed mills bagged feed in bags that were actually made of brightly colored cotton fabric folded over and sewn on three sides. He would back the Studebaker truck up to the dock at the mill before we went into the desk to pay. Outside, sparrows and pigeons waited for traffic to clear before swooping in for crumbs. We walked in through the mill, where every kind of feed would be ground and mixed, making a scent that ranks second only to a haymow full of new hay. We could see the big farm trucks come in to weigh and dump their loads of ear corn, shelled corn, soybeans, and wheat. Big three-phase electric motors ran the auger system and the overhead grinders and made the floor shake. One had to shout over the noise. It was terrifying to see entire loads of grain disappear into a small opening in the floor, and my grandfather made very sure I didn’t get too close. As we left we got another walk through the fragrant mill where I could distinguish the smell of corn, soybeans, and molasses. Sometimes there was a sour smell outside where grain dust could get wet from the rain. I’ve loved an elevator ever since.

The parking lot and mill were dusty, and that dust would often linger on the hats of the men who ground feed and swung the big feed bags into the back of the truck. Sometimes as we’d go home the little red truck would squat in the back a little, and I often thought it must have been proud driving through town among city folk to carry such a load with ease and confidence. I thought it would be thinking, “This little dab? No problem. I’ve got this. Just keep back!” Over the years I saw it loaded with crushed stone, dirt, furniture, kids, dogs, feed, livestock, and baby chicks.

That truck was a source of several lessons for me

Back home at the farm, my grandfather would pull the big bags of feed off the tailgate, then lift them and dump them into the feed barrels, shaking the remaining feed out by hand. There’s that feed smell again! He took them inside where my grandmother carefully ripped out the seams, washed them in the wringer washer, dried them on the line, then added them to her copious pile of fabric for many uses. I can still recognize some of the bag fabric from the quilt pieces she made.

That truck was a source of several lessons for me. It finally failed to start one day, although there was plenty of juice in the battery. We looked and looked, and finally decided to check the timing gear on the end of the camshaft that ran off a gear attached to the front of the crankshaft. It turned out the timing gear was a kind of hard composite fiber, but the other gear was steel. Over time, the teeth on the fiber gear wore away so it would not turn the camshaft. Better replace that fiber gear! My brother and I began to work on it, but did not have a gear puller. No problem. So long as we pulled gently against the gear and moved around the outside edge in a pattern, it should come off easily enough. We used a claw hammer at first, then moved up to a wrecking bar. We pried around and around the gear, patiently, of course. It took a while. We thought we were making slow progress when all of a sudden, the gear popped loose and landed on the floor. Aha! We were pretty proud of ourselves as we got the new gear ready to slide onto the end of the camshaft. It was odd, though, that the end of the camshaft was rough looking and flush with the block. There’s something you don’t see every day. To our horror, we realized that we had actually broken off the end of the camshaft. It was still in the middle of the fiber gear. Disaster time!

Now normally this would mean that the truck would have to be junked. We couldn’t just order a new camshaft for a Studebaker truck that was approaching twenty years old. But we had Depression parents and we understood that we couldn’t just throw away a perfectly good truck that needed a little work. There was an auto repair place down the road with a vast junkyard. They had a ’47 Studebaker truck in the yard with an intact engine that looked the same as ours. Guess who got the job of pulling the camshaft out of the junk truck? I took off the covers on the passenger side of the engine block, and there it was! The only thing holding it in place was the front seal and twelve valves, twelve valve springs, and twelve lifters. In this way I learned a great deal about how the valves operated off the camshaft to open and close at just the right time on a six-cylinder Studebaker Champion engine. I had to pull the valve springs and the valves to free the cam so it would come out through the hole in the front of the block. It had the same worn gear that our truck had, which was why it had been junked. I spent several hot days there that summer gently pulling the cam out under the raised hood. I left the fiber gear attached! Eventually I came home with the used camshaft. Then we had to take the ruined camshaft out of our truck. That one went faster. We took the truck down to the shop to have them pull the gear and put the “new” cam in correctly. It ran again. I drove it to school a couple of times and here and there in town. It was a good old truck.

Among many lessons the old Studebaker taught me was this one: If you need to pull a gear but don’t have a gear puller, just do something else until you get one. Believe me, it’s a lot easier that way.

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