Those interested in the early days of trucking and transportation have some exciting resources to explore in Alberta.
Heritage Park in Calgary has its Gasoline Alley display, featuring cars, signs, gas pumps, and other memorabilia from long ago.
At Pioneer Acres in Irricana there is a trucking museum with a remarkable collection of heavy commercial vehicles that provides a window on the working world of the early days of the last century (see, "The Mother Load" highwaySTAR, Oct. 2006, p. 38).
Not well known is that both of these collections are the result of one man's passion for rescuing artifacts from the dawn of the automotive age. His name is Ron Carey. Born in Regina in 1939, Carey grew up a farm boy in eastern Alberta. In the winter of 1956 he went to work on a drilling rig. For the next few years, Carey worked in the oilfields in the winter and on road construction crews in the summer.
The 'no-excuses, get-the-job-done' atmosphere of the oilpatch suited Carey fine and he developed a strong sense of respect for both the individuals and the equipment that made things happen regardless of temperature or terrain.
In 1963, Carey became a representative for Dresser Industries and by 1973 he knew enough about the drill bit business to start his own company – J & L Supply. Alberta in the booming '70s was the right place and the right time to begin servicing the oilpatch and Carey's company prospered.
When legendary collector Stan Reynolds of Wetaskiwin, Alta. decided to make permanent arrangements for a lifetime's accumulation of transportation artifacts, the result was the Reynolds Transportation Museum. What many people don't know is that the museum contains only part of Reynolds' collection. What the museum didn't want went to collectors – people like Ron Carey.
Carey actually started out restoring cars, specifically a '56 Lincoln convertible – much like the one which had been his pride-and-joy in the early oilfield days. However, what he found looking around the Reynolds collection would take him down a whole new road.
"He had what I thought were some neat old trucks," Carey recalls. He ended up buying half-a-dozen. Beginning with the restoration of a 1928 Mack and moving on to a 1922 White and a 1926 White, Carey was on his way to becoming one of the biggest restorers of heavy commercial vehicles in the world.
"Everybody's got cars," Carey says. "You can restore a truck today for a quarter of the price you can restore a car for because a truck's all big, hard parts. There's no big chrome bill, no upholstery bill. It's just a question of sandblasting and rebuilding mechanical parts."
Take one of Carey's biggest projects to date – his 1932 AP Mack 'Boulder Dam' dump truck.
"They were originally built for the Boulder (Hoover) Dam project," Carey says. "I think there were 19 built for the dam projects and there's only two left."
Bearing welded-steel boxes designed for remarkably heavy loads – "they were hauling 16 yards on a single axle where today a tandem truck carries 12 yards" – the trucks had specially-built radiators to cope with the high heat of the mountains.
Originally the dam project had depended upon a fleet of International trucks, but Carey understands the big Macks were able to do the work of five of the smaller units.
After the completion of the Hoover Dam, the Macks went to work on other projects in the western United States and finally ended up in a quarry near San Diego, Calif. Two of the fleet survived and became the property of a local transportation museum.
Over the years a number of people tried to purchase one of the trucks but Carey was the one whose proposal was accepted. "Many people wanted it just to say they had it. They said they would sell it to me if I would restore it," he remembers. It was a pretty big 'if'.
"It was a piece of junk," he says. "This was a huge restoration job because it had been modified, re-modified, and modified some more." The front end of the truck had been extended to accommodate a diesel engine and front-mounted radiator.
Just as important as having the facilities and resources to restore a truck like the AP Mack is the network of contacts that can lead to almost-impossible-to-find parts. Parts like the engine for a '32 Mack.
Carey found the six-cylinder powerplant for his restoration in the remains of a former fire department pumper truck, which had been parked in a field in Baltimore. "It was just rotted and rusted," he says. "We cut it in half and took the front half of it – not just the motor but the big fan assembly on the bottom."
"It's quite an accomplishment – restoring something like this," Carey acknowledges. "You get a great satisfaction out of finally seeing it done." The AP Mack, Carey says, wasn't the hardest restoration of the 40 or so trucks his people have done over the past 20 years. That honor goes to a pre-WWI Benz Gaggenau found in New Zealand and which is likely the only one of its kind in the world. Two other major truck restorations were of a 1911 Pierce Arrow and a 1911 Packard, nameplates more familiar to aficionados of luxury cars.
"My biggest thrill doing this stuff is finding some relic and somebody saying, 'You can't restore that' and then I prove to him I can," Carey says. "That's hunting the parts, building and putting it all together. It's kind of too bad – once I get them all done, the fun's over. I like to look at them but my biggest thrill is building them."
The story of trucks and their contributions is little-known today, Carey thinks, because so few trucks survived. "There were a lot more trucks around in the early days than people think," he insists. The problem was that once it was worked to death, a truck was of little use to anyone.
"What good was a truck?" Carey asks. "You sold it for scrap and scrap wasn't worth anything after either war." He has been told that a whole trainload of old trucks was once dumped in the Bow River to serve as support for one of the bridges.
When Carey will decide that enough is enough is hard to say. "Every year for the last five years I've said I'm going to quit," he muses. "But you find another one and another one." At present he is excited about his recent acquisition of a pair of WWI U.S. Army trucks, the Macks that earned the company its 'Bulldog' nickname, as well as a 1923 Kelly-Springfield which turned up in Montana.
"My son took my company over ten years ago. He started running it so I could kind of phase myself out," Carey says. "Now, I work harder than I did when I was here. I've got another 100 years of work in front of me. I've got to hang around for quite a while yet."
