Junkyard Find: 1962 International Harvester C-120 Travelette
There was once a time when you could buy street vehicles made by a farm equipment manufacturer, and IHC products still show up in self-service wrecking yards today. In this series so far, we’ve seen this ’70 Scout, this ’71 Travelall, this ’71 Scout, this ’72 1010 pickup, this ’73 Scout, and this ’74 Scout. The crew-cab Travelette is a machine you won’t see every day, so I shot this ’62 that I spotted in a Northern California wrecking yard.
Being a California truck, there’s minimal rust here, but 52 years of hard work have worn everything out.
Here’s a good old Black Diamond 240-cubic-inch straight-six, rated at 141 horses in 1962. Yes, that’s not much more power than a 2014 Corolla gets; pickup drivers were tougher back when instant annihilation threatened.
Two huge bench seats, and a custom shag-carpet headliner.
I’m a little puzzled by this bumper extension. Is this to protect the open tailgate when hauling extra-long loads?
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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Seems odd that International pickups never caught on. Farmers out here buy a lot of trucks, so why not an IH?
@highdesert cat--My granddad's 63 IH 1000 series step side had the same body style but it had single headlights. I am sure it had this same 6 cylinder engine with a manual choke.