For someone born in the early 1980s, this 1933 Chevrolet Series O 1.5-ton flatbed is an absolute antique. It is the kind of vehicle you would expect to see in a hometown parade or giving hayrides at a pumpkin farm in the fall. The tall and narrow radiator and headlights-on-a-crossbar are unmistakable early 1930s visual cues, and the combined width of the dual rear wheels are eclipsed by the mag wheels on the rear of a 1970s street machine. It is difficult to come to terms with the age of this vehicle when you were born just in time for 5.0-liter Mustangs, Jeep CJ-8 Scramblers, and the DeLorean. However, I think I have a way to explain the age of this truck in a way that’ll make perfect sense.
Meet my grandfather, Ken. Ken was born in Iowa in late 1918. This truck would’ve been brand-new when he was fifteen years old, working farm jobs near Des Moines. There’s a solid chance that he drove a truck like this back in the day. There’s a certain chance that he rode on one or in one as he busted his backside to make sure there was food on the table during the height of the Great Depression. You can picture him working with a couple other young men his age, chucking bales of hay onto the bed in a field somewhere. And keep in mind, just because automobiles had been around for a while at this point didn’t mean that horses and buggies were a thing of the past yet. This was just another workhorse… except it didn’t need any hay.
Take note of the license plate on the truck: 1956. A couple of decades on, Ken was in the middle of his military career. He joined the United States Army Air Corps as a lieutenant just in time for World War II, had married a fiery woman from Oklahoma and was starting a family. By the mid-1950s he had made the transition to the Air Force and was leading combat communications units, a role that he would continue with until his retirement as a full-bird Colonel in the early 1970s. In the Fifties, the Chevy was another used truck on the scene. No flashy chrome, no two-tone paint, no V8 moving it along. It was a relic, a throwback, or any period-correct slang used to describe how out-of-date it was. When Ken retired, trucks like this Chevrolet, if they were still in service at all, were working close to the farms that muscle cars and station wagons roared by.
That photograph was taken in 1988, when I was five. A truck like our featured Chevrolet was an antique. Most of the ones that were still in one piece were yard art items or museum pieces. A working flatbed truck of this vintage was the odd man out. There were more comfortable, more powerful options available that were still simple to maintain and operate. There were competent pickup trucks that could do the work and provided creature comforts like air conditioning and automatic transmissions. Ken certainly had moved on with the times. Deep into his retirement, he had just traded a 1984 Chrysler E-Class for a 1989 Chrysler New Yorker, while his trusty 1978 Ford F-250 Camper Special was parked next to the house, ready for the next mission.
It’s 2025. This Chevrolet is a few years short of a century of service, still running, still more-or-less unchanged from the day somebody handed over a few hundred hard-earned dollars for what may have been their first powered vehicle. Ken passed on in 2007, a month or two after his wife. His grandchildren are enjoying adulthood, from my college-aged cousins to myself, who is past the mid-way mark and is getting close to that hill everyone talks about. Decades of history and major world events have passed by since this truck was delivered to the dealership that sold it. The world went from horse-drawn implements to the Atomic Age and beyond any wild dream a kid from 1933 would’ve had. How would you explain things like supersonic aircraft, space exploration and the internet to a farm kid from Iowa? He’s just floored that a new flatbed Chevrolet has pulled into the farm, ready for its first day of work.
In 2025. My joints crack, my bones ache, I still have many miles to go myself, and I’m just floored that this truck is still in one piece, weathered but original, and is still ready to work.
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