1950 Ford F-1 Pickup

1950 Ford F-1 Pickup and Phone-box Truck


From my childhood I remember the Sinclair commercials, or at least those featuring the green brontosaurus. I remember Sinclair giving away brontosauruses as a promotional items, but can't remember if I had one or not. I don't think I did because my Dad always bought gasoline from the station where he occasionally worked part-time, an Esso station. Sinclair was bought out by Atlantic-Richfield in the late 1960s, and I remember the green dinosaur sign being replaced by an ugly, dinosaur-less, ARCO sign. Such is progress. Well, I least I've had the pleasure of building a green and cream model on which the Sinclair sign fits perfectly. (I also note that Sinclair gas stations can be found, here and there, once again. I don't know anything about that story in corporate terms; I know only that it serves to slightly muddy the transforming sign scene in my "Boxcars" short story.) The 1950 Ford pickup truck is from the Revell kit, the winch is from the Lindberg '34 Ford pickup kit, and the Sinclair dinosaur decals from, IIRC, the Lindberg kit.

Back in the 1950's, before vans came into heavy use, the phone company used a truck of their own design - a pickup cab with a boxlike back. I remember those trucks, and was curiously disappointed by their replacement by vans, just as I was disappointed when vans supplanted panel trucks as delivery trucks. This truck uses the Revell 1950 Ford pickup kit for the body, with a resin phone-box produced by Hendrix resin, chrome handles I gathered from a variety of kits, and a pipe-rack for ladders that I fashioned from chromed part trees. This is a project that came out nearly perfectly, one I'm particularly proud of.