The new year will here in less than four weeks, which means I’ve started to take inventory of what my 2021 has looked like. I go through this process around this time every year, almost like the self-evaluations many of us perform at our jobs. I’ve begun to assess my accomplishments and things I wish to improve, made plans for things I want to do next year, and then have also sat back and let it all soak in without trying to do anything else that’s too cerebral. Some days when I sit down to write, I have fully formed ideas, and my typing fingers struggle to keep up with my brain as my thoughts come to me. On other occasions, I’m low on inspiration and/or energy and mostly just want to share a few pictures of a vehicle I find interesting or compelling. Today is one of those days, but there is a common theme between this vehicle and the outgoing year as I’ve experienced it.
If the front grille of this Scout II is an accurate indicator, this one is a 1977 – ’79 model. It was originally manufactured in Fort Wayne, Indiana, territory familiar to our own contributing writer and participant, J. P. Cavanaugh. He had previously covered histories of both International Harvester and also the Terra pickup variant of the Scout II, roughly five years ago. That’s the kind of comprehensive reading many Curbside readers come here for, and it’s a great essay and introduction to both make and model for many unfamiliar with either. The International Harvester brand will always remind me of my maternal grandfather, a crop farmer who had many pieces of equipment stored in the cavernous, metal pole barn behind my grandparents’ house in northwestern Ohio, pictured above in a photograph I had taken in the early ’90s.
Many of those pieces of equipment belonged to some of the farmers who leased land from my grandparents, and we kids were cautioned not to play around on or near those giant machines. My beloved grandma, who I still think about often, had no shortage of tragic, gruesome accounts of dismemberment, decapitation, and other pleasant bedtime stories. However, my grandparents’ I-H Cub Cadet riding mower provided me with some of my earliest driving experiences – with supervision, of course. (Everything should have a throttle control marked with a turtle and a rabbit on either end of its continuum.) The discovery that the same manufacturer who made the Cub Cadet also built vehicles immediately endeared me to the Scout II and the Chevy Suburban-like Travelall parked in the driveway of our neighbors across the street from the second house where I grew up.
The Scout II was never a truly plentiful vehicle, and while there are some sources of information online, data on these isn’t readily found everywhere. From the original Scout’s introduction for 1960 through the end-of-the-line 1980 models, there were over 532,000 produced overall. Though the updated Scout II was introduced for ’71, the only production figures I could find for it went back only to ’73, with a total of just over 272,606 produced from that year up until the last one rolled off the assembly line on October 12, 1980. I’ll again reference J. P. Cavanaugh’s earlier post, in which he had detailed the reasons for the Scout’s eventual discontinuation, including a months-long strike. Of those production figures I could find for the Scout II, ’79 appears to have been the high water mark, with over 44,000 sold.
I had spotted this particular example in Chicago over ten years ago on a late summer Sunday evening. Its tape stripe graphics don’t look like any that I’ve since seen in print ads for the Scout II for any model year, so I wonder if they might have been applied by one of its owners at some point, perhaps after a respray. These vehicles were notorious rusters, and aside from a little bit of surface corrosion, this example might have been given an aftermarket rustproofing treatment like Tuff-Kote Dinol or Rusty Jones. (Remember those?) I don’t have any clever metaphors or other things to say about our featured Scout II, outside of the fact that I like it and am glad it existed (and hopefully still does) and presented itself for a quickie photo shoot. Here’s hoping for continued exploration and inspiration into 2022 as we all continue to scout out, read, and write about the vehicles that interest us out in Curbsideland.
North Center, Chicago, Illinois.
Sunday, September 4, 2010.
Click here for a related post on a ’71 Scout II I had spotted in downtown Chicago traffic four years ago.
I always wanted a Scout. Back in my teens and early twenties I had a couple of CJS, but
even then (nineties) good Internationals were thin on the ground in the Mid-Atlantic.
It was always exciting to see clean ones when I would be in less salt mad regions, but
somehow the holy trinity of cash, vehicle, and sufficient desire never materialized.
The closest I came was finding what I considered at the time the ideal spec on
a small car lot in Gastonia NC circa 1994. It was a mint green 1970 with the 304 and
was as new. Every factory decal was in place and mileage was under 30k.
For a couple of days I attempted to figure out how to come up with the $2500 asking
price, but to no avail.
My only IH ownership experience came a few years ago when I briefly had
a 1 ton 4×4 pickup with the 392. I purchased it from a rural fire dept, and it had less than
20k on it, and no rust. It felt solid in an armored vehicle kind of way, with diesel like
torque.
They were popular where I grew up in northeast Wisconsin with hunters and fishermen. Maybe more so than Jeep CJ’s. My uncle had a 1970 Scout exactly like the one you described, 304 V8, 3 speed manual, 4WD. I learned to drive stick on it. The engine had a really cool sound idling. And a hand choke.
In the ’70’s I went with friends to visit Chicago’s O’Hare airport. They had a few Scouts as tow motors for pulling the luggage trailers to and from the airplanes.
Our family lived in White Bear Lake Minnesota in the late ’60’s. The USPS there had a fleet of 2WD, RHD Scouts as mail trucks. Those things didn’t like salt and didn’t last long unfortunately.
20 years ago, I was a sleepaway camp counselor at a camp that had a battered green Scout II that was used as a ranch truck, meaning it was unregistered and just knocked around the property. It looked rough, was a manual transmission, and had the doors removed It was one of many cool old American trucks on the property, probably the coolest one. I never got to drive it, but those on the maintenance staff did, and it looked like a tough, little tossable truck.
“The Scout II was never a truly plentiful vehicle” – Well, you just didn’t live in the right city. 🙂
The Scout was probably at least as popular as the Jeep in its home city, and I remember seeing them regularly in shopping center parking lots and in suburban driveways – mostly loaded up versions with air conditioning and bold stripe packages. The one my friend’s family owned was oddly conservative – a solid metallic pea-soup-green (that would have been at home on about any Mopar of the time period) with a beige/gold interior that featured a brocade-like cloth upholstery. Whitewalls, wheelcovers and factory air completed the package that was powered by the AMC 6/Torqueflite. I think the original owner had been an I-H engineer.
For reasons I am still trying to work through, I wanted nothing to do with a Scout when I went looking for a car of my own. But I guess they were a little new when I started looking for a car in early 1977 and by the time they got into the age I could afford they were in pretty bad shape with rust. Oh well, I can enjoy someone else enjoying this fine example.
Where I grew up in Philadelphia, Scouts were mighty uncommon. But my father had a co-worker who’d moved from Colorado, and he drove a Scout… with big-rig style mudflaps, no less.
Back then, very few people actually moved to Philadelphia, so the fact that he came from a far-off land… and someplace where people drove vehicles like that Scout… greatly impressed me as a kid. His example is still what comes immediately to mind when I think of an IH Scout.
You probably didn’t want a Scout for some of the same reasons this Flint kid didn’t want a Buick.
There were about a half million scouts made.
Nice snapshot of a vehicle which was really ahead of its time, in concept if not execution. And thanks for linking JPC’s more detailed history which I must have missed then. I spent quite a bit of time in or around my friend’s ‘76 (I think) Scout II for which he had bought all the parts to convert from Traveller SUV to Terra pickup. Not an easy job (and he worked in a body shop) with lots of screws, seals etc to get right so that nothing leaked or rattled. His was V8 with TorqueFlite, I think a 345. Very comfortable to ride in for long trips; not so great to drive as at least for part of his ownership it had about a 1/2 turn slop in the steering, and not the best straight-line stability. I always felt like one of those actors in a driving scene in an old movie, sawing away at the wheel to stay in my lane.
Just last month, I gave my daughters their first driving experience on a 1990s-era John Deere 425 lawn tractor, which has a similar turtle-and-rabbit throttle control. Predictably, they loved driving it. I started them both off on the “turtle” mode — a great idea for beginning drivers — and then gradually increased it.
At one point, my older daughter took the tractor out of my sight, and pushed the lever to “Full Rabbitspeed.” I saw her flying up the gravel road, and knew exactly what she’d done. I’d have done the same thing at her age, of course.
Hahaha!! Eric, I still maintain that “full rabbit” could come to represent an all-out, no-holds-barred effort at something.
i.e., “I had an assignment, and I went ‘full-rabbit’ on that bad boy.”
Great article Joe. My wife’s family, when she was a kid, had a 4th generation Travelall which they used “in the country” on weekends, while they rode in VW beetles during the week in the City (Queens, NY). I still hear stories about that Travelall. That open-top Scout looks perfect for Arizona (it seemed to have AZ plates). It definitely conjures up warmer days.
I can’t wait to find a reason to use “full-rabbit” in some context related to work…so that I can explain the turtle-rabbit-continuum.
Thanks, Jeff. Your mention of the AZ plate made me look closer, and you’re right. The Arizona climate is probably one of the things that prolonged the life of this example, where rust is concerned.
I always liked the Scout – they were just a little different from your everyday Jeep or Bronco or other 4-wheel drive. And coming from a company like International that also made heavy duty trucks you knew they’d be tough little beasts off road. Unfortunately, as others have said, they rusted badly, and I haven’t seen one in Ontario for many years. It’s good to see one still around even if the pictures are a few years old.
Love the Scout. Hate the rust. Growing up in NEPA, (mid 90s) I only remember seeing 1 or 2 that were rusted out so badly they were only used as unregistered on site snow plow rigs. CJs both in registered and unregistered forms outnumbered the humble Scout. About 15 years ago, a friend of a friend had a 1980 square headlight Nissan diesel powered one on the road in my part of VA, but I believed the owner and the Scout moved away. Painted a faded 70s green and in stock form, beautiful truck.
I was a small engine mechanic up until recently and the amount of times I would yell “Put it in turtle!” or “Full Rabbit!” for basically everything over the course of a day were endless. I still yell Full Rabbit when I downshift my Cherokee before I do something dumb.
On some older Rockshox brand mountain bike forks, there were also rabbit and turtle icons on the rebound adjusters. But what did that mean? Was the rabbit for fast riders, and thus perhaps a stiffer setting, with more damping? Or did it just mean faster rebound, like a bouncy bunny? It was in fact the latter.
Hah, Rusty Jones. I was pulling parts off an exceptionally rusty Scout with a friend a few weeks ago—the kind where you bring multiple cans of PBblaster, a propane torch, and a cutoff wheel in your kit—and found a couple of small plastic medallions affixed to the inside of the liftgate opening that I didn’t recognize: Ziebart plugs that filled the holes they drilled. This truck was from southern Pennsylvania, so the Ziebart treatment probably added about six months of life to that Scout.
I’m thinking of writing a history (biography??) of Rusty Jones at some point — it was kind of an ingenious and memorable marketing ploy. What got me thinking about it is that there’s a remarkably rust-free 1981 Suburban that I see occasionally around here, and it has a small Rusty Jones sticker on one of its rear windows. I’d forgotten about those stickers before I came across that Suburban.
You should do it! I mentioned Rusty Jones, and the equally prevalent Ziebart, in one of my COALs and one of the commenters said that he’d worked for the company and that it wasn’t really just a marketing ploy.
I donno….
But it does seem that you can buy the stickers for about $8.50 each, so perhaps the Suburban you saw was actually from New Mexico or otherwise preserved and they just put on a new sticker.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/164309807425
I never considered that one could buy new Rusty Jones stickers. But of course! Everything’s available on eBay.
I have read that the Rusty Jones rustproofing was a decent product… by “marketing ploy” I really meant the salesmanship of the name and the character.
From what I recall, the company that made this product (the company’s name was Matex… as written in the bottom-left of the sticker) had marketed it for years, with a very chemical-y name of Thixo-Tex, but came up with more memorable Rusty Jones in the late ’70s, and the product took off in popularity. The Rusty Jones marketing was successful with customers, and also successful in getting dealers to buy into the product as a pre-sale accessory.
I’ll add this to my list if must-do articles for 2022.
Wow – it looks like this Scout II had accomplished a lot during its lifetime. Seeing the Travelall next to it makes me think this might be one of the highest “concentrations” of Internationals I’ve seen for a long time, though I’m sure there are specialists out there with a bunch of them.
The guy who owned them had a trio of D-series pickups and one Scout, so a friend and I swooped in and pulled parts as fast as we could. They’re getting thin on the ground here in the Mid-Atlantic so you have to act fast. He got more pickup parts than I did Scout parts—it was pretty far gone.
You know, one of the ironies of a 4WD vehicle like an I-H Scout / Scout II is that aside from rocky terrain in arid climates, they would be of most use in areas that have a lot of snow… and road salt, which then led to their corrosion.
It would be an interesting QOTD to poll the CC readership for the shortest amount of time from their purchase of a new vehicle to when they started to notice rust start to appear. I’ll bet there would be a lot of Scouts, Vegas, and Aspens / Volares racing for the “crown”.
My uncle had 2 Scouts, a ’64 Scout 80 and a 1970 Scout 800A another uncle (his brother) had a ’69 Travelall. Up in Wisconsin with typical care they all started showing perforation at about 5 years. On the ’64 it was the rockers. On the ’70 it was the rockers and tops of the fenders. The ’70 Scout was Ziebarted with a 5 year warranty that just happened to expire when the rust popped through. Both Scouts had about 26,000 miles on them. The were mainly used for local hunting and fishing. Rarely used for long trips.
The Travelall I believe it was rockers and front fender bottoms behind the wheel opening.
Joseph, you have no idea how much it pains me to keep my Scout tucked away in the garage from December until April, but I’d like to keep it from disintegrating into a pile of rust in my driveway like the first one did.
To the rust question—add modern Dodge pickups, whose rear wheel wells always seem to be dissolving when I see them.
I totally get this. Keeping your Scout put away(for its own good) from December through April seems like the reverse of getting presents for holidays.
I’m glad you brought up the rear wheel wells of RAM (is that an acronym? not sure) pickups, as I have noticed this as well. Chrysler products from around ten years ago (the Cerberus years) seem to have subpar rust protection.
I have a 1976 scoutll with 345,traveler, only made five years of the travler 76-80. Scout ll in 1977 & 1979 won the baja 1000 & other races over those years,Beating out jeeps,Broncos&blazers. I have done some research on this,&found the scout had won by a landslide in most races offroad…It was scoutll as that won.