Junkyard Find, 1991: When 1960s Vans Still Hauled Parts On Half Price Day
More than two decades before I owned a Dodge A100, I admired the boxy mid-engined cargo haulers and enjoyed photographing them. Here’s a shot from the parking lot of a now-defunct self-service junkyard in Hayward, California, circa 1991; this is Half Price Day and these are customers’ vehicles. Yes, it’s a Dodge A100 and an early front-engine Ford Econoline.
20 years later, you might see battered vans of this vintage hauling greasy engines, but not today; most of them were eaten by the Crusher quite a while back. I took these shots while shopping for Impala Hell Project parts with my friend Chunky Deth; he was picking up some bits and pieces for his band’s Dodge Sportsman gig rig.
I found this strip of negatives loose in the bottom of my file cabinet, so equipment-fetishist Photography Jihadis should feel free to take a break from tedious discussions of barrel distortion and let fly their sharpest barbs against both my choice of grainy news-photographer film and the dust and scratches that my 1997-vintage version of Photoshop (gasp!) can’t remove.
You can’t have too many Quadrajet intakes!
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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That top picture is a two-fer for me. I have owned both a 1966 A-100 and 1974 E-100, but the Ford was the one with the slotted "mag" wheels, and the Dodge had the giant big-rig mirrors.
For the record: 1991, Photoshop 2, Mac IIsi w/17 megs of RAM. Guy who sold me the Mac didn't believe that I wanted 17 megs and shipped it with 9 (he'd never heard of Photoshop). Took a while to sort that out. Thomas Knoll wrote Photoshop — and still lives in — Ann Arbor, my home town.