Junkyard Find, 1991: When 1960s Vans Still Hauled Parts On Half Price Day

by Murilee Martin

September 1st, 2011 4:16 PM

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!

#1960s #1991 #A100 #Dodge #DodgeA100 #DownOnTheJunkyard #Econoline #FordEconoline #Junkyard #JunkyardFind #Van #Photography

Comments

Join the conversation

2 of 11 comments

Nikita on Sep 02, 2011

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.

Like Reply
Aaronx on Sep 03, 2011

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.

Like Reply

Recent Comments

28-Cars-Later Another: How does Stellantis plan to leverage the EV experience of PSA and Opel (?) against the former FCA operation?
Ltcmgm78 We bought a 2017 Volt when it came off lease. What a great car! Cost us $18,000 to buy. We put gas in it a couple of times a year. GM blew it with this car as they have done with others. No buyer education. This should have been the bridge car between pure ICE vehicles and pure battery vehicles. No range anxiety at all. And ours still gets 44 mpg running the gas "generator" to power the electric motor. We love it and wish a new model would return to market.
Tassos "Fools Cells" are 20 years into the future.THe problem is, the clowns who cheerlead for them have been saying this for the last 20 years, and before that they claimed they are only TEN years into the future (in 1990. so they would dominate by... 2000). Toyota Shareholders and workers will suffer because of the EGO of those damned fools execs who wasted TEN YEARS, letting TESLA dominate the BEV industry (of the FREE WORLD, China excluded).
Urlik You’d think VW would have learned from Honda and Cadillac making the same mistake to varying degrees.
EBFlex This will be the end of the Dodge brand. They are going from making vehicles people actually want to little pieces of garbage like the hornet and government cars (EVs).