Mazzarella drives the Divcos mostly in local parades, and he and his wife occasionally take one of their Divcos to car shows. The front looks like an Airflow Chrysler,” he said, referring to a series of 1930s cars that represented some of the earliest efforts at aerodynamic design. “But they were a cute little truck back in the ’50s. Mazzarella said in an interview at his home, where walls are covered with Divco memorabilia. “There’s not many of them around in good enough shape to restore,” Mr. The trucks tended to rust from the inside out. Milk crates were loaded into the back of the truck and covered with ice and sometimes rock salt. Like many Divco collectors, he had to replace the steel floor of the truck. After refurbishing it, he had it painted red with black fenders and adorned the sides with the logo of Cloverdale Farms in gold leaf. He found his first Divco at a junkyard in Arizona about 15 years ago, he said. every day in the late 1940s and made a nickel for each quart of milk he sold. Mazzarella about restoring his Divcos - which he says he did mostly by himself - turns into a reminiscence about how he worked from midnight to 7 a.m. “We’ve met a lot of interesting people, too.”Ī conversation with Mr. “It’s a good hobby - keeps him busy,” said his wife, Grace. Mazzarella keeps two 1950s-vintage Divcos in his garage on West Point Island, N.J. Joe Mazzarella once delivered milk, butter and cheese in the New Jersey suburbs of Maplewood, South Orange, East Orange and Irvington, as well as Newark. “Well, the Divco is synonymous with home delivery in the cities.” “If you go buy a box of facial tissues, you’re probably going to buy Kleenex,” he said, drawing a parallel to the way fleet owners viewed Divco’s popularity in the market. He also owns several Divco trucks, though he says now that he did not particularly like working on the trucks as a mechanic. Crist also has three of the five Marmon-Herrington DeliVr-All trucks known to be in existence. “Here’s what I did all my life, and it’s going to go down the drain if no one knows anything about it,” Mr. Buying the Thorne truck was a way of preserving his past, he said. Crist’s many jobs with Rutter’s before he retired in 2000 was to maintain its fleet of milk trucks. He owns the 1936 Thorne gas-electric stand-and-drive truck that Rutter’s used to deliver milk for 18 years. Jay Crist, who keeps 25 refurbished stand-and-drive trucks at a private museum in Manchester, Pa., worked for Rutter’s Dairy in nearby York. The stubby trucks are collected by nostalgia buffs attracted to the notion of earlier, innocent times as well as customizers who find the bulldog face and streamlined front end an ideal starting point for a high-power engine transplant.Ī few are rescued from junkyards and peddled on eBay for several hundred dollars others change hands for thousands among collectors - or go to buyers looking for a marketing tool to park in front of their shops.Ī restored Divco can sell for more than $30,000, according to Les Bagley, director of the Divco Club of America, which has 750 active members nationwide. Today, Divcos have a considerable following - and not necessarily because they are fun to drive. While most commercial vehicles of those years passed quietly into history, the distinctive Divco trucks became icons. “I always say it looks like something Walt Disney would have designed.”ĭivco, an acronym for the Detroit Industrial Vehicle Company, built trucks of various sizes and job descriptions from 1926 to 1986. Pane said as he piloted the truck down West Farms Road here one Friday afternoon last month. Pane, who found his milk truck in the classified section of a local newspaper, drives it in a parade every year in Farmingdale, N.J. The snubnose Divco attracts more than its share of attention on these runs, as it does when Mr. Pane never was a milkman, and he is hauling faux milk from a dairy that never existed, but none of that seems to matter. Pane, 52, takes his role-playing truck out for a rumbling spin on the roads around the Manasquan Reservoir in central New Jersey. To complete the charade, he tracked down glass milk bottles from a local dairy and painted the insides white to make them look full. Pane found a script that seemed to be out of the 1950s and had the truck lettered. In homage to the truck’s career of early morning milk dropoffs, he chose an imaginary identity with an appropriate small-town ring - Golden Glow Dairy Farms.įiddling with possible designs for a period-correct logo in a computer program, Mr. AFTER completing the restoration of his 1957 Divco delivery truck with a fresh coat of paint in a creamy shade of yellow, Lou Pane set off in search of the perfect finishing touch.
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