History Lesson 
Wheels of Fortune
To the delight of automakers in Detroit and elsewhere, there's only one vehicle that matters to every single Texan: the pickup. And no wonder. Whether it's a West Texas ranch hand or a suburban soccer mom behind the wheel, the pickup says a lot about who we are—and who we'd like to be.
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THE PICKUP DIDN'T SET OUT to be an icon for Texas or anywhere. The Ford Motor Company introduced the first mass-produced, factory-built pickup, the half-ton Model T Runabout with Pick-Up Body, in 1925, after Mr. Ford took note of a significant number of his cars with their back seats cut off and replaced by small cargo boxes. He sold 30,000 of that first batch of pickups, enough for Chevy and Dodge to follow his example. But any big hopes for the market were soon scotched, first by the Depression, when no one could afford a new vehicle, and then by World War II, when no one could find one, as American automakers dedicated their production to the war effort. After the war, all of that changed. Soldiers returning to rural America wanted the trucks they'd driven overseas, vehicles like the Dodge Power Wagon, a four-wheel drive created specifically for the military that would become a fixture on country roads. At first automakers sold surplus trucks left over from the war, along with pre-war-model cars and trucks, the only vehicles they were ready to build when their plants shifted back to commercial production. But the first new models Detroit introduced were pickups, first at Chevy, in 1947, and then at Ford and Dodge, in 1948. The farms and ranches that were still driving the U.S. economy ate them up.
The pickup's emergence was well-timed for Texas ranches. In the fifties America began its exodus to the cities and suburbs. Up to that time, ranch work was done by groups of cowboys spending weeks in bunkhouses far out in the field or camping around chuck wagons. The shrinking rural labor pool made that kind of help harder to find, and pickups took up the slack, reducing the amount of time and the number of hands needed to work a ranch. Small ranchers were able to cut back their costs and in many cases acquire more land. Even the big Texas ranches that were generally able to hang on to their hands saw that working from trucks would make their operations more efficient. When use of stock trailers became widespread, in the sixties, ranch hands were able to take just the horses they'd need to a job each day, as opposed to driving a remuda out and staying for weeks at a time. The cow camp and the chuck wagon became a thing of the past, a development that some old ranchers lament as the end of the real cowboy. "It used to be a cowboy had to be able to do two things," says Jim Hoy, a cowboy folklife scholar at Emporia State University, in Kansas. "He had to be able to ride a horse and get a rope around a steer. Now he had to do a third: keep an old Ford pickup running, which was probably the hardest of those three things to do."
Unless, of course, you lived in the city, in which case it was the only one of the three you could realistically hope to pull off. So if the modern Marlboro Man rode in a truck, that was no tragedy for residents of Houston, Dallas, or San Antonio. As the pickup replaced the horse in the image in their heads, the cowboy didn't so much decrease in their estimation as become easier to emulate. "A pickup is a holdover, a part of the myth we can hold on to," says Ron Tyler, the director of the Texas State Historical Association. "Even though I live in the city, being able to go out and buy a truck is a chance to relive this historic time in Texas when a pickup was an absolute necessity."
IT TOOK ABOUT TEN YEARS of cowboys in trucks for the pop-culture curve to catch up with reality. In the 1963 movie Hud, there were two primary vehicles: a Dodge Power Wagon driven by Hud's father, the proud, tradition-minded patriarch of a Texas ranching family, and a convertible Cadillac driven by Hud, the brash heel who could not have cared less for family or land, let alone tradition. The contrast was simple to understand. One was a work vehicle, the other a citified status symbol. For all the charisma that Paul Newman brought to the antihero Hud, by the time he slammed his Cadillac into the back of the Dodge in the film's climactic scene, leading to his father's death, it was clear that the angels, and more to the point, Texas tradition, rode in the truck.
Larry McMurtry says that when he wrote Horseman, Pass By, on which Hud is based, he wasn't looking for metaphors when he chose the two vehicles. But if there's any irony in McMurtry's career, it is that his dry-eyed looks at Texas have always inspired nostalgic fits for the fans of his books. So he may not have meant to be anything but authentic when he put Sonny and Duane in a pickup in The Last Picture Show, his utterly unsentimental look at growing up in Archer City. But when Peter Bogdanovich's film version of Picture Show came out in 1971, the pre-war, split-windshield Chevy truck that the boys used for petting sessions and a weekend bender in a Mexican border town seemed like the only tool that could squeeze life out of a small country town.
Or the only means to even survive. In Elmer Kelton's 1973 novel, The Time It Never Rained, rancher Charlie Flagg refused to surrender to the seven-year drought that devastated West Texas in the fifties. "Charlie's pickup never became a character," says Kelton, "but as his situation declined, he had more and more problems with his truck, so it became a sort of symbol." And just as Charlie wouldn't accept any federal relief, he kept that pickup running.
By the time John Travolta's Bud drove into Pasadena during the opening credits of 1980's Urban Cowboy, McCombs's gamble had paid off, and pickups had made it to town. You no longer had to be a cowboy to drive one. It didn't matter that the only things Bud put in the bed of his truck through the entire film were a suitcase and the groomsmen from his wedding. His pickup, a black, long-bed Ford with fog lights mounted on a chrome roll bar, was an extension of who he wanted to be, not who he was. And since the film's real accomplishment was in confusing a way of life with a look, the pickup became a fashion accessory, a way to live the dream with a degree of certainty that a shirt with snap buttons could never provide.
That dream was sold on television shows too, where driving a pickup implied an earthy, practical heroism. There were carefree, cocksure stuntmen like The Fall Guy's Colt Seavers, no-nonsense lawmen like Walker, Texas Ranger, and of course, heart-of-gold modern cowboys like Ray Krebbs on Dallas, the Southfork Ranch foreman who managed to be a good guy without being the weenie that Bobby Ewing was.
All these images are at work in pickup sales now, according to Dave Hickey, an art and pop culture critic who grew up in Dallas. "Pickup trucks now are like that beer-commercial country music you hear in Austin and Lubbock," says Hickey, referring to the Pat Green types who name-check Lone Star beer and pickups in every other song. "It's not about being 'country' but acknowledging we're from the country. There's a deep red-state anxiety, where everything is about nostalgia." To Hickey, who admits that a van would have been a better choice than the Chevy pickup he drove when he owned an Austin gallery in the sixties, a truck suggests ruggedness in a less than rugged time. "We don't ranch, we don't work, so obviously we need a pickup."
Thomas Hine, a design critic and an author whose 2002 book I Want That! examines American consumerism, goes deeper into why. "When most people go to work, they sit at a computer screen, doing everything they do in the abstract. They'd prefer to be doing something more direct, something that expresses their competence." Thus the recent rash of do-it-yourself weekend landscapers and home improvers, people who fill Home Depot parking lots with pickups each Saturday morning. But he knows that there's something more at work in Texas, where pump jacks still pump and ranch hands still rope and the rodeo still sells out the Astrodome. "In Texas," says Hine, "it's part of the ethos."
The most accurate look into that ethos today is the animated television series King of the Hill. When it first aired, in 1997, it opened the only way it rightly could, with Hank Hill and his neighbors Dale, Bill, and Boomhauer standing in Hank's driveway, drinking beer and looking under the hood of his pickup. The four of them were struggling, in a manner of speaking, to figure out why his truck wouldn't run. Dale opined that the vehicle suffered of being a Ford. "You know what they say 'Ford' stands for, dontcha? It stands for 'Fix it again, Tony.'" Hank allowed that Dale's assessment would make sense if his truck were a Fiat. Then mush-mouthed Boomhauer mumbled something about "sparkblugs." Hank let that thought pass. He saw a bigger concern. "I'll tell you what my truck really needs: leadership. Detroit hasn't felt any real pride since George Bush went to Japan and vomited on their auto executives." It was not a commentary on industry or politics but a declaration of person and place. That driveway could have only been in Texas.
IN 1989 DODGE WAS WORKING on a makeover of its Ram trucks that would come to define the look of the pickup today. It had been seventeen years since the Ram had been redone, and in the meantime Dodge's market share had fallen to barely 6 percent. Full-size pickups were boxy back then, and so were Dodge's first prototypes. But when an engineer decided to try out a different look, he came up with a design patterned after the old Power Wagon, with squared-off front fenders jutting out from an elevated hood and a front grill that looked like clenched teeth bared into a stiff wind. The design resembled a small Mack truck or, more important, a great-big pickup.
Dodge held two major clinics for consumer feedback, one in Dallas and one in Fort Worth. The response was mixed, with about half the audience scoring it a nine or a perfect ten, the other half rating it at four or below, and no in-betweens. Internally, Dodge started calling it its "love-hate" front end and decided to take a chance that the lovers would buy it. Then it went to work on other elements the Texans had said they wanted: greater horsepower and acceleration, stronger towing and hauling capacity, and bigger cab dimensions. In the summer of 1993 Dodge rolled out the new Ram. It was bigger, stronger, and tougher-looking than anything else on the road. Sales leaped from 40,000 of the 1993 model to 230,000 of the 1994. Fred Diaz, now the director of marketing communications at Dodge, was selling trucks at the time: "We had to go to Texas because Texas is the horse's mouth."
"I don't think there's ever been a truck program, certainly not one done by Ford, that didn't have a market-research event in Texas," says Leo Shedden, who was the business director for Ford's truck group when he retired in 2002, after thirty years with the company. "Typical respondents down there knew their trucks. No matter what segment of the population we would talk to, young or old, male or female, they knew something about fuel economy, power trains, towing, performance, trim level. They even knew what options were available."
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