In our formative years, certain things are just accepted as “given.” The dictionary has almost half a page describing that term (give, given, giving) but the definition used here is “to concede or grant as a point in an argument.” Much of what we learn is just the way things are. It isn’t until we are older and wiser that we question something. Even then, most of the world around us is accepted just the way it is.
Probably the one item that is questioned more than any other is food. Each culture has items to eat that other cultures would reject. On Aug. 7, 1942, when the U.S. Marines invaded the island of Guadalcanal, they were short of supplies. A captured Japanese headquarters promised to have foodstuffs to supplement GI rations. A supply of canned goods was found in an officer’s tent. Although they were hungry, the Americans discarded them all. Reason? The cans contained a Japanese delicacy: raw pickled fish eyes.

Although the U.S. is a huge country where an unbelievable variety of agricultural crops is produced, through the first half of the 20th century, American farmers functioned similarly in many ways. The transition from horse farming to tractor farming was basically complete by the 1940s. The small family farm was still the basis for agriculture and frugal lifestyles were the norm. Having come through the Great Depression, farmers put special emphasis on making careful decisions about finances.
Growing up in the early 1950s, I assimilated the standards of my elders. Many things were accepted without question. If there was a current issue that was important to the adults in my life, they discussed it in detail, much of the time in my presence. This is not in reference to the controversial subjects of politics or religion. Times were changing rapidly and people needed to understand what was happening and make adjustments.
No patience with frivolity
Even as a kid, I was interested in automobiles. I vividly remember overhearing an uncle (not the one I would work decades for) tell about a new farmer who had moved into the area. None of what he said registered with me until he loudly expressed his surprise that the newcomer “had a Studebaker pickup with a radio in it.” That was such a shocking thing to him that he couldn’t criticize it enough. His following sentence was, “What does he think he is doing? Going to the opera?”

What a revelation to me, as a kid! There were such things as Studebaker pickups? All I knew of were International, Chevy, Dodge and Ford pickups (listed from most to least common in my little corner of the world). And a person could get a radio in those strange pickups? My world had just expanded in a big way. I didn’t understand that the rural world I lived in had no use for frivolous (and likely expensive) changes to the way things were done at that time.

I also didn’t realize that mindset would live on for several decades with the hardy farmers in our area. When I got old enough to work and drive on a farm, I never knew anyone who had a pickup with a radio. Many farmers were “well to do” from profits made during the war years, but none had pickups with radios. Maybe that was because farm work during that time consisted mainly of using tractors for long hours doing field work, all of it with the operator sitting out in the open. The sounds experienced by tractor drivers were mechanical ones, usually quite loud. Maybe you have heard old-time operators of John Deere tractors expound on the beautiful sounds the two-cylinder engines made. They considered that music to their ears. Having experienced some of that, I can kind of understand. Regular music never fit in.
Not where the work got done
The uncle I worked for so long rejected my inquiries as to why he didn’t get a pickup with a radio. I was surprised that the idea of being entertained with voice and music had no appeal for him. But he was convinced that nothing that came over the radio had anything to do with farming. Secondly, his philosophy was that he – and certainly none of his employees – should spend no time in a pickup because that wasn’t where the work got done.

In the early post-war years, most pickup manufacturers made no provision for their pickups or trucks (they used the same cabs) to have a radio installed. But by the 1950s, some had “radio-shaped knock-outs” stamped in the dash and wiring was available where radios could be installed if a factory radio was desired or an after-market one could be fit. But rarely were they used.

There is surely a date when the pickup became more of a general transportation vehicle and less orientated to commercial purposes. When that happened, radios (and other features like built-in turn signals) slowly became readily available in common pickups. When a new model of a common pickup is announced today, we are told how fantastic its sound system is. We older folks who drove pickups when they were just pickups look back and recognize that, back then, the simple act of driving was entertaining. Music and news were not important. FC
Radio signaled changing times
Development of the radio was a monumental event in most Americans’ lives. Until those small receiver boxes were available and regular programming became common, the average person had no music in his life other than that created by live performance. Entire books have written about that phenomenon but our focus here is on how radios were introduced into automobiles. Not until the 1920s was the first radio put in a car (a Studebaker) and it was determined that automobiles were ripe for radio expansion.
Like every early development, the equipment was originally crude and large in size. By the 1930s, new cars were equipped with radios. My father bought a new Oldsmobile 6-cylinder business coupe in 1937, just before he got married, and he purposely paid a premium for a factory radio. That was obviously long before I came along, but it was still the family car when I was growing up. The radio in the dash – along with an optional clock in the glove box door – helped make the dashboard balanced and attractive.
However, I never heard that radio play. The antenna was under the running board, hardly an ideal place for a car that spent 100 percent of its time on dirt and gravel roads. And we lived so far from a radio station that no radio could receive programming without a large antenna on the peak of the house. That excessive distance from the nearest station played into the general understanding that, in our agricultural area, automotive radios were impractical.
Improved hardware and over-the-air signal were rapid, thanks to fast-evolving technology during World War II. By the late 1940s, automotive radios were fairly common. (Radios became so common in later years that a new term [“radio delete”] was coined to describe the rare vehicle that didn’t have a radio.) At this late date, it was almost impossible to photograph trucks built in the 1930s to compare to those built in the 1940s and later. Those shown here capture only three pickups of the era but they clearly show the transition as radios became a standard automotive feature.
A retired high school history teacher, Clell G. Ballard has worked on farms since he was in grade school, including 53 summers spent working on his uncle’s dryland hay and grain ranch. He also is a dealer of World War II era military vehicles and parts. Contact him at (208) 764-2313 (and bear in mind the time difference with Mountain Standard Time) or by email at cballard@northrim.net.
Originally published in the February 2023 issue of Farm Collector.