(first posted 11/16/2016) As a car-crazed kid growing up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, I was always envious of other people who came from “car towns”. Detroit was, of course, the mother of all car-towns, but there were many others. Those from Lansing had their Oldsmobiles, while those from Kenosha favored their AMCs. CC’s ranks of authors include Joe Dennis who hails from Flint (Buick City) Michigan and Jim Grey from South Bend, Indiana, home of the late, great Studebaker.
It took awhile before I realized that I came from a car town too. As a school kid, we were all taught about Fort Wayne history. There was General “Mad Anthony” Wayne of the Revolutionary War and Chief Little Turtle of the Miami people. John Chapman (better known as Johnny Appleseed) was buried within the old suburbs of Fort Wayne. And yes, there really was a fort there at one time which has been recreated in recent years.
None of my teachers, however, ever found it necessary to teach we kids about Fort Wayne’s automotive heritage. I knew that my hometown was a very industrial city back then, with companies like Magnavox, Rea Magnet Wire, Tokheim Pump and other manufacturing companies where a lot of fathers made livings for a lot of families over the decades. We were even home to a manufacturer of automotive and marine pistons, The Zollner Corporation. Zollner is probably best known for the fact that it’s owner moved his pro basketball team (the Zollner Pistons) from Fort Wayne to Detroit in 1957, in search of a bigger market. I understand that they are still known to play some basketball from time to time.
The king of Fort Wayne factories was, however, International Harvester. Fort Wayne was not International’s headquarters (which was in Chicago) but it did have an assembly plant that had turned out heavy trucks in huge numbers since the late 1920s. Only much later did I learn that this factory in my hometown was also (after the end of Canadian production in 1968) the sole source of the International Scout.
I knew little of International Harvester, despite knowing several people who worked there. I found it strange that everyone called the vehicles “Internationals” while everyone referred to the employer as either “Harvester” or “The Harvester”. I did know that it was a big operation in which tons of miscellaneous parts were converted into trucks. I also knew that the company was in not-great financial shape through much of the 1970s. I knew this from the periodic layoffs that seemed to roll through the ranks of family members and acquaintances with startling regularity. But somehow I did not know that this was where all of the Scouts came from.
It is funny how I harbored many youthful daydreams of touring a working auto final assembly plant, but could never manage to talk my family into a vacation in a place where one of those plants was. Yet here I had one in my own backyard and didn’t even know it.
Scouts were a normal part of life in Fort Wayne in the ’70s, and I just sort of assumed that they were universally popular everywhere else too. Not Chevrolet kind of popular, but at least AMC or Jeep kind of popular. I started to really take note of Scouts when I met my best friend Dan in the fall of 1972, and soon thereafter got regular rides in the ’71 Travelall that his mother drove everyday. Dan’s father (my car-mentor Howard) soon traded the Travelall on a Dodge van, but later bought a ’74 Scout II from a friend around 1975 or 76.
I spent a lot of time in that Scout, as it’s designated role in life was to serve as No. 1 car for the three teen drivers in that family during their high school years. Each of the three wrecked it at one point or other, and each time (except for maybe the last) it was rebuilt with fresh body panels. Which was perhaps the only way to keep a Scout II from rusting in northern Indiana. It was an expensive way, but still a way.
I got a fair amount of wheel time in that particular Scout. I would have liked driving it a lot more if it had sported either the IH-built 304 (5.0 L) or 345 (5.7 L) V8s. This one, sadly, was saddled with the, uh, relaxing performance of the AMC-sourced 258 (4.2 L) six, which droned gamely through its Torqueflite automatic. Until I drove an automatic Mustang II that belonged to a friend of my mother’s, that Scout was the slowest thing I had experienced. Getting a ride in another Scout while in college was eye opening. It was seriously rusty, but with a 345 and a stick, it also had some serious scoot.
The Scout story would come to an end in 1980, but the party seemed like it would go on forever in 1976. I was sad to see my beloved Travelall disappear from the scene that year, but a vehicle of that class had not really hit the mainstream acceptance that the Suburban would find within a few years. But never mind, because the Scout seemed to be where the action was, and International broadened the line. The Scout Traveler was a slightly enlarged Scout II, presumably designed to provide maybe 80% of the Travelall’s utility. I suppose we could consider it sort of a Scout II.V? And then there was this one: the Scout Terra.
I was a little confused by the name. I was taking latin at the time, and knew that “terra” meant earth or land. So, Scout Land? Land Scout? Dirt Guide? Whatever the name meant, it was marketed as America’s only mid-sized pickup. This early effort at brand extension was meant to divert attention from the fact that beginning in 1976, International would be without a standard duty pickup truck (the Light Line) for the first time in about seventy years. There had been a Cab Top version of the short wheelbase Scout II since 1974, but it had never sold well and disappeared when the Terra was introduced.
The Terra, with its 118 inch wheelbase and 6,200 pound GVW should have provided a viable pickup choice. It was larger than the new crop of compact pickups but smaller than the standard sized trucks (including the dearly departed “Other Pickup” from International.) On a 118 inch wheelbase, the Terra was a big jump over the Scout II’s 100 inch wheelbase and was even a little longer than the 115 inches on the shortest wheelbase of the 100 Series of the departed Light Line pickups (though not nearly as long as the 132 inches on the larger 200 Series trucks). Unlike the Light Line trucks, the Terra’s body was constructed like the 1961-62 Ford “unibody” pickups which lacked a separation between the cab and the bed.
When the Scout Terra was introduced, the six cylinder engines were gone. The standard engine in 1976 would be the “Comanche 4”, a 196 cid (3.2 L) unit which not so coincidentally measured exactly half of the International 392 cid (6.4 L) which had been cut in half to make it. The four was rated at 86 bhp @ 3800 rpm, but made its 157 ft. lbs of torque at 2200. Which was not a lot of output for an engine that weighed nearly 550 pounds with standard accessories. Of course, the International-built 304 and 345 V8s remained available as optional equipment.
I found this Scout Terra for sale in a car lot near me which was always good for some interesting finds. Until it went out of business. Could it just be easier to sell used Camrys and F-150s than unique things like a Scout Terra?
Never having spent any time around one of these undersized pickups, it was both familiar and foreign to me at the same time. These were never anywhere near as common as Scout IIs in Fort Wayne (or anywhere else, most likely). But the basic bones of the Scout are recognizable at 100 yards. Another familiar thing about this Terra is rust. Scouts rusted like mad in their hometown, where briny streets are a way of life for a third of the year. There are not many vehicles that look good with patch panels visibly riveted onto the lower body, but I think that this Scout handles that look better than most.
The Scout had steadily sold in the 30,000-40,000 unit range through most of the 1970s, even reaching about 44,000 in 1979. Unfortunately, the combination of a nasty strike and a nasty economy resulted in a disastrous 1980 model year that came to only about 13,000 vehicles. I have not been able to find figures that break Terra and Traveler production out from the Scout II, but have seen that those two offshoots provided a healthy dose of Scout volume in the final years.
The whole company was in a bad way by the end of the Scout’s life, with over half of the Fort Wayne workforce on furlough by September of 1981. What had once been a juggernaut of industry had become a shell of its former self by 1979. That 1979 strike against International came about after President Archie McCardell got a $1.8 million bonus at the same time it was trying to squeeze work rule concessions out of the union. But even without that strike, the economy was preparing to fall off a cliff by the beginning of 1980, so no factory reliant on Scouts and heavy trucks was going to make it for long. We knew that the end was coming when International announced in the summer of 1982 that it would close one of its heavy truck plants. We also knew that Fort Wayne dated back to the 1920s, while the Springfield, Ohio plant was much more modern. Fort Wayne’s closure was announced that fall, and the last International truck rolled off of a Fort Wayne assembly line on July 15, 1983.
In one way, Fort Wayne’s story in auto manufacturing has a relatively happy ending. Where South Bend never really recovered after the closure of Studebaker in late 1963, the vacuum left by International in Fort Wayne was filled within a few years by General Motors, which built a modern new light truck assembly plant there. But Chevy and GMC pickups are built in several locations around the country, so we natives of the Summit City lack the same kind of pride in those that came from the Scout. Or would have, if we had known then what we know now.
Further reading:
1963 International Scout 80 (Paul Niedermeyer)
Scout II Rallye (Outtake – Paul Niedermeyer)
1972 Scout II (COAL – Eric VanBuren)
1973 Scout II Cab Top (COAL – Eric VanBuren)
Pretty cool! I didn’t know such a thing existed. Is the top removable?
Yes, the top could be removed. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it was pretty much the Scout Traveler (extended scout) with a bulkhead bolted in after the front seats and a Scout II tailgate. I had the Traveler version with the 196-4, there was a metal plate where the other head would go. Yes, that motor was slow, but it had torque, and we never got it stuck. We once plowed 6″ of snow off the top of the driveway with the front bumper during a blizzard.
Yes the top bolts on as does the bulkhead that separates the cab area from the bed area. You can convert from one to the other and it was possbile and some people did order them from the factory with both a Travel Top and a Cab Top. I’ve seen a picture of a Line Set Ticket for a truck delivered with two tops. I’m not sure they still offered that once the Traveler and Terra came along since the Traveler had a one piece hatch instead of an upper and lower tail gate.
The 152 and 196 4 cyls do not have a plate bolted on where the head would go but they do have a lifter cover to access the lifters.
Thanks, it’s been 20 years since I was last in the hood of one, you are probably more correct 🙂 I do remember the plate, but my memories must be fading…
It would be tucked under the intake manifold. Here is a picture of an industrial version the fuel pump boss not machined and a SAE bellhousing adapter.
Great history of a truck I didn’t take much note of JP, and had mostly forgotten since it was built. Nor was I aware how vulnerable Scouts were to continued production, given a sole location. This is a truck that is hard to wrap my head around. Definitely cool, but maybe the straight through body hurts its image of practicality; whether true or not, separating the bed seemed to imply easier component replaceability until we got the recent 4 door haulers configured that way. There was also an idea that it would allow for less of an accordion effect from load variation. Was it actually all about production interchangability between long and shortbeds?
BTW photos of “last models built” like the one you included are always so sad to look at. You look at the people in them and wonder what happened to them afterward.
I’m always amazed at the cluelessness of CEO’s who will simultaneously take a big raise/bonus while trying to force a pay cut on the workforce. To me, it usually has a lot to do with why the company if in such financial straits that they trying to take it out on the working man in the first place.
And, even more amazing, the board is usually happy to go along with such a move.
I suspect some of them aren’t clueless at all, and know exactly what they’re doing.
Then, as now, it was all about stocks. If a company is traded publicly, the incentive to cater to the stockholders over customers and employees proves irresistible for the weak minded and avaricious.
Well the management/econ mantra is “the function of a corporation is to maximize shareholder value”, and everything else (like actually producing something) is just a means to an end. However a short-sighted focus on the bottom line over things that will work toward success in the long term (like a loyal, well-compensated workforce and a desirable, well-crafted product) always equals disaster.
I sometimes wonder if the “golden parachutes” CEOs secure for themselves actually incentivize failure. Run the company for 15 years, make a generous salary, and hand a healthy company over to a successor when you retire, or run the company (into the ground) for 5 years, make the salary plus a boatload of bonuses, and then take a multi-millon severance package when you get booted from the now-failing company and retire early? One is a lot less work than the other if you don’t actually care about doing things the right way.
Very nice JP, I’ve never seen a Terra pickup.
BTW, my home town of Hamilton had both Studebaker and IH plants, although IH produced tractors and implements in Hamilton.
Fort Wayne wasn’t quite the sole source of the Scout, Canadian Scouts were assembled at the Chatham Ontario plant up to 1968
http://www.superscoutspecialists.com/store/t-CanadaSLLbuilt.aspx
Thanks for the factoid on Canadian production – I have made changes to the text. I imagine that killing Canadian Scout production was only possible after auto trade laws got opened up in the late 60s.
Great to see a Scout that hasn’t biodegraded yet! There’s a nice example of one that I see occasionally near me, and would love to write it up, but so far it’s eluded me.
Your comment that the Scout was both “familiar and foreign” to you really hit home, since I realized that I feel the same way. Scouts, and their various iterations, have always intrigued me, though I hardly ever saw them on the roads. And I learned a great deal from your write-up that I never realized, like that they were made in Ft. Wayne, for instance.
Growing up in Philadelphia, these were always a rare sight, and I can’t even remember where an International dealer was located. Yet in the early 1980s, my parents had a friend who moved from Colorado with a Scout, and resultantly I always associated Scouts with a rugged, western lifestyle. I can still remember his Scout, decked out with big-rig style mudflaps that said “Colorado,” and thinking how wonderfully out of place that vehicle looked in a big, East Coast city. However, like most of its kind, his Scout didn’t make it through the 1980s without rusting apart.
On this example, I assume the car was repainted at some point, but someone found what must be an original set of Comanche arrow-and-feathers decals, which couldn’t have been an easy thing to track down.
Actually most of the decals are being reproduced and if you want the guy that does them will customize them in colors that the factory never did.
This one has had at least some paint work since the one end cap appears to be the proper Omaha Orange and the rest of the truck some other color. Plus the OE decals would have lots of cracks by now from shrinkage unless it was always stored inside.
Nice write-up, JP.
Back when they were in production, I always thought Terras were a bit of a curiosity. With a few decades of hindsight, however, I think, “Hey, what a nice sized truck.” My sole experience with a Terra was a yellow one that was a trade-in at the Volvo dealership where I worked in the 80’s. I made a few repairs to it before it went on the used car line. It was powered by a Nissan(?)-sourced 6-cylinder diesel. Its acceleration was leisurely, to be charitable, and it at least had a stick. Although the tin worm is less prevalent here in the Southwest, spotting any flavor of Scout is a rarity.
I remember news articles about the strike and the eventual choice to focus production in Springfield. Sad times….
Depending on the year that Diesel was sourced from Chrysler, who of course sourced in from Nissan. In early years it was referred to as the CN-33 for Chrysler Nissan 3.3. The contract between Chrysler and Nissan ended so the middle man was cut out and the engine got a name change to SD-33 Nissan’s own nomenclature.
Fascinating and well-written article, JP. There are few mainstream / semi-mainstream American vehicles I haven’t heard of, and until this morning, I had no idea a “Scout Terra” had ever existed. Great-looking truck. As you referenced above, with me coming from Buick City, it’s hard to have the same kind of pride in the new models that aren’t built in Flint, much like how Ft. Wayne must feel about building GM vehicles after International.
I associate IHC with both the mid-70’s Travelall that my neighbors in Flint, the Donlans, had in their driveway (which got traded for a blue Caprice Classic wagon in the mid 80’s), and my grandpa’s Cub Cadet riding mower. Grandpa would disconnect the mowing apparatus and let my brother and me drive around the farm, as long as we kept the throttle closer to “turtle” than “rabbit”. (To this day, Peter claims he got that thing up to “full rabbit”, but I don’t believe him. Grandpa would whup him from the grave.)
I will admit that I enjoy playing “stump the band” here occasionally. 🙂
And I love the mental image of the Dennis boys wrestling with the heady temptation to go “full rabbit” on the Cub Cadet. In fact, “Full Rabbit” is an expression that should have wider use.
+1 on “Full Rabbit”. A colloquialism that should certainly “Go Viral”.
Full Rabbit…I’m going to have to remember that one. It really is a fantastic expression!
They may have been financially struggling but they did not compromise their quality.
Too bad they couldn’t have hung in there another 10 years, the SUV fad could have lifted them into current times. There are still many rust-free Scouts on the west coast, they’re highly regarded by true off-roaders to this day and fetch a decent price in spite of their orphan status.
I have thought the same thing many times. By 1985, the SUV thing was really blooming. In my alternate reality, the Travelall would have become the preferred tow vehicle for the high-dollar Airstream crowd once the 500 cube Cadillacs went extinct, and a 4 door Scout Traveler would have been the perfect minivan alternative for those who preferred SUVs.
And after all these years, I would own a Scout II in a heartbeat. But as you say, when you find them, decent ones are expensive.
Somehow I haven’t been able to find it for years, I’m afraid my MIL may have tossed it when she was helping up pack to move, but at one point I had the Scout Business Unit’s plan for staying in operation for 1981 and beyond.
There were 3 options proposed.
One of the proposals was of course to continue on and expand sales by line extensions. One of the proposed line extensions was a mini-van version complete with sliding doors on both sides. They also had extensive market research showing that a “compact” “MPV” (as they were legally known) would increase in popularity dramatically and be a major segment by the early 90’s.
Of course that was not to be and many of those former SBU engineers soon found themselves looking for employment and many found a home at Chrysler. Option 2 on the list was to sell it as an on going concern. And who did they have extensive talks with about purchasing the SBU, Chrysler. They also figured heavily into Option 1 as they would have likely supplied the “emissions compliant” gas engines for 1981 and beyond with at least one slant 6 prototype being built for evaluation.
In the end of course the board of directors went with Option 3 shutting it down, when the deal with Coachman industries to do final assembly of the SSV or Scout Supplemental Vehicle (the one line extension that made it to multiple prototype stage) fell apart at the last minute.
It is a shame that your teachers never talked about the automotive heritage of your town. Most towns didn’t have a Boston Tea Party or a Battle of Gettysburg to make them famous. They were built around the factories and Mills and farms that sustained the population back then. To ignore local history because it’s not glamorous enough is leaving out a huge chunk of the historical record.
+1
There was (and I believe still is, although I am not 100% sure) an International engine plant in the Chicago suburb I lived in in the 80s. Who knows, maybe some of those engines got shipped to Fort Wayne!
I remember seeing Scouts in and around Chicago back in the 70s and 80s.
They looked like Swiss cheese after only a few years, road salt destroyed them.
The Park District, School system and also Cemetery’s bought several for grounds use.
I’m always intrigued by the parts found in restomod/retrofit examples. If I’m not mistaken those seats are out of a late 90’s Quest/Villager. I wonder if they were bolt-in or if custom mounts were fashioned. The driver’s seat appears to be a passenger seat transplanted, as evidenced by inboard recline lever.
Seat swaps are rarely, if ever a bolt in.
humorously, PT Cruiser seats bolt almost directly in; it just requires drilling two holes in the tracks. (My second Scout came with second-hand seats from a Shelby Charger which both sucked, so the PT Cruiser seats went in).
“We were even home to a manufacturer of automotive and marine pistons, The Zollner Corporation. Zollner is probably best known for the fact that it’s owner moved his pro basketball team (the Zollner Pistons) from Fort Wayne to Detroit in 1957, in search of a bigger market. I understand that they are still known to play some basketball from time to time.”
I bet a lot of people assume the Pistons are called that due to Detroit’s association with the auto industry, and would be surprised to learn the team (and its name) originated elsewhere. The Midwest was an early hotbed of both pro football and pro basketball, and there are a lot of cities in the region that would today be considered way too small for a major league sports team that once had teams in the NFL or NBA (or in one of the NBA’s predecessor leagues like the BAA or NBL). The NFL of course still has one remaining Midwestern “small-town team” that never moved, the Green Bay Packers.
Along the same lines as the Pistons, the Houston Rockets aren’t called that due to Houston’s association with the space program – the team started out in San Diego.
The Los Angeles Lakers and Utah Jazz presumably don’t have that sort of problem. Actually, the Lakers have been in L.A. for so long that no one gives the name a second thought, and the same is probably true of the Jazz among generations younger than me.
“The Scout had steadily sold in the 30,000-40,000 unit range through most of the 1970s, even reaching about 44,000 in 1979. Unfortunately, the combination of a nasty strike and a nasty economy resulted in a disastrous 1980 model year that came to only about 13,000 vehicles.”
Someone posted ’70s Scout production figures here a while back, and I was struck that while the Scout was obviously a niche product that wasn’t going to sell in high volumes, sales were relatively healthy until very near the end. Contrary to what you might expect, there wasn’t a long, steady decline. It seems like the Scout was killed as much due to larger problems at the IH corporate level, and the effect of the recession on IH as a whole, as for reasons specific to the Scout. As others have noted, it’s too bad the Scout couldn’t have hung on for just a few more years, to the point when the SUV boom really took off.
I was hoping someone might pick up on the basketball thing. From what I could gather, the Pistons started as the Zollner company basketball team and morphed into a pro team by maybe the early 40s. Fred Zollner died in the early 80s and the company was eventually merged into a foreign company. I think that the Zollner name may still exist in pistons. A friend’s father worked there for a time in the 70s and told me that the manufacturing equipment was really old-school even then.
I was surprised on those sales figures too – the Scout line’s best sales year ever was 1979. International Harvester is one of the great stories of long term slo-mo corporate implosion. It was one of the most vertically integrated companies ever – they even made their own steel at one time. I once had a case where my insurance company client hired an elderly metallurgist as an expert witness. He was fascinating to talk to as he graduated engineering school around 1931 and his first job was as a metallurgist for International Harvester. He said it felt like becoming a part of the bluest of blue chip companies then. But by the late 70s, almost every line they were in seemed to be in trouble.
Count me in as one who was surprised to learn of the Detroit Pistons’ heritage. You never know what you’ll learn in any given day.
And I like the animated Piston Man. It’s much more distinctive than the team’s current logo of… yawn… a basketball.
As soon as I saw the old graphic of Piston Guy playing basketball, I had to use it!
Welcome to 2022. You would get cancelled if you tried to use the Piston Man as a mascot, there’s bound to be an offended pistonian somewhere.
Maybe he’d just be pissed off ? .
-Nate
“From what I could gather, the Pistons started as the Zollner company basketball team and morphed into a pro team by maybe the early 40s.”
That was how a lot of pro basketball teams from that era got their start. Before the emergence of the NBA after World War II, pro basketball was not an especially stable or lucrative profession. Companies would recruit graduating college players to both work for the company (from the player’s point of view, hopefully putting them on a good career path) and play on the company team. The players were technically amateurs, because they were theoretically being paid to work for the company, not to play basketball. Eventually, some companies like Zollner got serious enough about their basketball teams that they dropped any pretense of being amateur company teams and went full-on professional, paying players specifically to play basketball.
Not every company did this, however, and high-level amateur company teams survived into the 1950s (and even to some extent beyond), even competing with the early NBA for players. To many players, the idea of getting on a stable career path with a company sponsor was more attractive than what might turn out to be a short-lived, not especially lucrative pro career. Some of the top teams of this era played in a league called the National Industrial Basketball League, and U.S. Olympic teams were typically made up of a mixture of college and “company team” players (remember, the latter were technically amateurs, unlike NBA players).
By the second half of the 1950s, the NBA became stable enough that most top players now went that route, and the company teams faded into the background and went into decline. By the late ’60s they had mostly ceased to be a part of the basketball scene.
You remind me of an older lawyer I once worked with. He had attended college on a basketball scholarship, and I believe he graduated in 1951. He then played professional basketball for a short time, not more than a year, and I have forgotten the team. He *hated* it. He was always a competitive guy, and remembered that in high school and college games, he was on teams out to win every game. But in early 50s pro basketball, it was just a job to many of the players. There was no money or fame in it at that time, and unless the game was really close, the attitude of his team was often about just showing up and getting finished without expending too much effort. I think that was when he quit to join the Marines.
Actually the while general problems of the larger company were definitely a big reason that the Scout Business Unit was closed another big factor was the government. Specifically emissions and CAFE. Somewhere floating around the internet is a copy of an article from their employee publication The Tower (referencing and picturing the tower on the building above). It quotes a young Al Gore admonishing International’s request for an exemption from CAFE because of the nature of their vehicles. He said they were too heavy because IH was just lazy and they could easily loose 10lbs of weight from the oil pan alone, a part which weighs about 8lbs. To get around the emissions thing they did consider going all diesel, and they also considered purcahsing emissions compliant “automotive type” 6cyl and V8 gas engines from one of the Big 3. The 225 slant 6 was identified as the 6cyl they had built a prototype of but they didn’t pin down the V8’s under consideration. Many believe the 318 was most likely since that would have provided for easy one stop shopping not only for their gas engines but their automatics too.
I was also going to mention something about CAFE in my remarks below, but with vehicles designated as trucks, wasn’t there little or no CAFE to speak of impacting International as these vehicles suffered their demise?
As you said, emissions would seem to be covered, especially where International was buying drivetrain components that were made compliant by other manufactures.
It would seem safety might have been the biggest impediment to International when trucks became subject to standards (whenever that was). Engineering and testing a low volume vehicle would have been very expensive.
International pulled the plug at the tail end of the Carter Administration, which had been pretty aggressive with the auto industry in terms of safety and emissions regs as well as CAFE. Did the Reagan Administration ultimately relax some Carter rules (or not follow through with some that might have been expected)? I recall Reagan’s election was met by many with a level of shock near to what we have seen in the last week. So International could be forgiven for expecting that 1980-84 would be the continuation of a regulatory environment from what we had seen from 1976-80.
Truck CAFE existed and in the early years there were actually two truck fleets 2wd and 4wd which is one of the reasons that the 2wd versions were dropped. Also Truck CAFE like today didn’t apply to “Heavy Light Duty Trucks” Emissions were also tiered based on GVW. The entire reason that the Terra has that 6200lb GVW was that in 1975 the gov’t moved the line between light and heavy, light duty trucks to under/over 6,000lb GVW. So by bumping up the min GVW they were able to avoid passenger car emissions levels that dictated a Catalytic Converter. This also affected their trucks and Travelall with a boost to that same GVW and a rename from 100 to 150. Ford and GM did the same thing with Ford adding the F150 and GM introducing the Heavy Half for customers wanting to avoid the Cat and buy a “1/2 ton” truck. Of course GM and Ford had complaint passenger car engines so their standard 1/2 ton and F100 continued.
Eventually that demarcation point was raised again and IH had to put on Cats and were subject to CAFE. That meant the 2.72 gear ratio became standard on the V8 models and they introduced the Thermoquad carb on the 345.
Even with the change in administration the proposed tighter emissions standards for 1981 did take effect and we started seeing computer controlled carbs and O2 sensors to make them work.
I have to wonder about the strike, on the one hand I can certainly see the management wanting to hold the line if for no other reason to confirm their bias that the SBU should be sold or closed. On the other hand why not make hay while the sun is still shining and crank out as many as possible in the swan song year. By that time many were going out the door with a big load of options and quite large for the times sticker prices. The ones that had stop at the Midas van conversion factory for a full 7 passenger interior often complete with a built in cooler would make a Lincoln or Cadillac buyer do a double take when they saw the sticker price.
Note they did extend the run past their traditional model year change over day of the first business day of Oct to fill the orders they had. Supposedly some of that Oct 1980 production were sold in Australia as 1981 model year since they didn’t have the same emissions rules.
For years IH subscribed to the no model year and a designation change with generational changes much like they did down under. In the US that changed when FMVSS, and emissions regulations were introduced that were tied to model years and not production dates.
A good article with a well written story .
I spent lots of time in a ’63 (?) Scout in New Hampshire in the middle 1960’s, it was falling apart from rust but always ran and drove .
-Nate
Ive not seen a live Scout for a while they were sold here but didnt really become a hit in a market dominated by Landrover and then by the Toyota Landcruiser.
Nice homage to one of the rarer versions of the Scout. I had a very serious crush on the turbo-diesel Traveler. It was everything I wanted in a vehicle at the time. But it was very pricey, and I think only came with the stick (a no-no for Stephanie) and was of course a bit gnarly all-round. Getting little kids strapped into the back seat would have been quite a chore too. But there were a few running around WLA and Santa Monica at the time, and they always turned my head.
Actually you could order the 727 behind your diesel in some years, but I’m not sure if it was on the NA, the Turbo or both.
The diesels that were destined for a manual trans were supplied with a SAE bellhousing while those supplied with a 727 used a Mopar Big Block bellhousing and of course a 727 with that pattern. I think that the AT option went away when the partnership between Chrysler and Nissan dissolved and IH started buying the diesels directly from Nissan. Either way they are a very rare beast.
Never knew the Terra existed until today–cool find. The spiritual predecessor of the Jeep Comanche, after a fashion? I guess it would have also competed with the Scrambler, if that was still in production by the late 70’s.
There seemed to be a healthy number of Scout IIs around central North Carolina when I was a kid, and some of them made it past the millenium, but they just about all seemed to disappear at that point. I did know of one guy in college who had one, rough but running.
You could purchase a Cab Top from the launch of the Scout II. In the abbreviated 71 production you actually even purchase a Roadster version as a standard order option. The Roadster version went off the standard order form for 72 though I’m certain you still could have done a special order with a top delete w/o any problem. You just would probably get one without the unique Roadster version of the strip that covers the seam between the inner and out fenders. Though the version shown in the 1972 “What can’t you get in a wagon from America, Europe, or Japan?” brochure shows a topless Scout from with the full deluxe Travel Top interior and those Roadster strips so you don’t see the holes for the top mounting bolts to go through.
I was hoping you would be along to plug some holes. In writing this, I proved to myself how lacking I am in deep IHC knowledge. International’s products seem to have many parallels with those of Studebaker, and one of my Stude rules is that when someone says some combination of parts was never offered, someone else will come up with a car that proves the rule wrong. I suspect International is much the same way.
I never saw a lot of odd Scout combinations. All of the Scouts I remember seeing around were for Suburban parents carting around their kids, with the bonus of being able to get around in bad snow. The Scout was fairly civilized for the time, especially considering that the first Generation Bronco was its contemporary for most of its life. Most Scout IIs I saw had air conditioning, stripe packages, whitewalls and wheelcovers, and were the spiritual ancestor of the Jeep Cherokees and Expeditions that became so popular in later years.
Nice kick-off to International day (week?). Living in the Midwest, the presence of International models on the road seemed to exceed their sales numbers.
It is somewhat astonishing that International built low volume consumer vehicles. It seems a bit off the mission statement, and you have to wonder what these ever contributed to the bottom line.
I don’t see an alternate future if these had hung on into the SUV and truck era. AMC, with its much higher volume of such vehicles didn’t have the scale to survive even with it’s far more extensive line-up of such vehicles. Safety standards alone require considerable volumes in popularly priced vehicles.
Still, I’m glad they were around, and they made the landscape more interesting.
One thing that occurs to me – I can’t recall anything about an International consumer market dealer network. Where these sold out of commercial and agricultural dealers?
I recall an International truck dealer in downtown Fort Wayne in the 70s, a time when virtually ever other dealer had decamped from the central city to the burbs. ScoutDude will know more, but I suspect that a sparse dealer network was a factor.
Originally the Scout was treated as a completely separate line and they sold Scout Franchises to many existing dealers with Chrysler-Plymouth dealers seeming to the the most common ones I’ve seen/heard about taking them on as a side line. But you also had stand alone Scout Dealerships and at that time you could say they had more “models” that many other brands. Roadster, Wagon, Convertible Wagon, Cab Top, Convertible Cab Top, Sport Coupe, Convertible Sport Coupe and Panel Top body styles were all available, though not all at the same time.
Eventually the Scout brand was folded into the Light Line which was the Pickup based vehicles. There were also full line IH Branches that sold all manner of trucks. Additionally in farming communities it was not uncommon for a dealer to have AG on one side of the building and trucks either the full line or partial on the other side.
Ernie Bisio well known in the IH community as the last Scout dealer shared with me his story of how he came to be selling Internationals. He was a used car dealer when they came out and the Chrysler dealer down Sandy Bvld in Portland picked up the Scout Franchise. He wasn’t selling too many and asked Ernie if he wanted it as his guys, in their suits and ties, “didn’t know how to sell it”. Ernie had great success with the Scout and soon picked up the Light Line trucks as well. When he finally called it quits a few years ago he had the oldest continuously operating automobile dealer license in the state of Oregon.
“Ernie Bisio well known in the IH community as the last Scout dealer shared with me his story of how he came to be selling Internationals. He was a used car dealer when they came out and the Chrysler dealer down Sandy Blvd in Portland picked up the Scout Franchise. He wasn’t selling too many and asked Ernie if he wanted it as his guys, in their suits and ties, “didn’t know how to sell it”. Ernie had great success with the Scout and soon picked up the Light Line trucks as well. When he finally called it quits a few years ago he had the oldest continuously operating automobile dealer license in the state of Oregon.”
1948 was when he first got his dealers license.
As far back as I can remember(am 65)either riding or driving by and seeing a whole car lot full of IH vehicles. As the years wore on and IH stopped making the vehicles he sold I began to think it was a little odd that he was still selling IH vehicles but I figured he must be making money doing kind of like some of the Studebaker dealers did after 1966. It wasn’t until the late 90s-early 00’s that the story came on the internet that I finally found out the whole story.
Here is a great article on the great Ernie with a little from Creed Brattain who covered the district from Ernie’s beginnings as a Scout dealer. http://www.oregonlive.com/business/index.ssf/2008/09/ernie_bisio_and_his_internatio.html There are also some great video interviews of him on YouTube for those that are interested in the legend.
Here’s a pic from 1973 taken in Casper, Wyoming that happens to include an IH dealer. Check out the row of Scouts in the front!
Great picture! Those actually look like Light Line pickups and/or Travelalls to me, though. You have to catch the subtleties of International Harvester’s rectangles. 🙂
Traffic sure was “teeming” that day.
Terrific article on an iteration of Scout that is new ground for me.
The Ford wheels look rather native in this application.
Enjoyed the story JP. I’m native to Fort Wayne, and still here. Had many rides in Scouts over the years, never drove a Scout II.
The story brought back a lot of memories. Remember hearing the plant’s whistle being heard across the whole town? It was sort of a miracle that GM built their plant here. I imagine a lot of cities wanted that plant, and Harvester’s line workers were notorious for being less than exemplary.
Great piece. Some more-or-less relevant remarks:
At the wrecking yard where I briefly worked, IHs of whatever model were called “Intertrashionals” because of the ridiculously lousy parts interchange situation with many of them. Oh, you need a [whatever] for your ’73 IH? Uh-huh, and was your truck built between August 21 and September 9 of ’72, between 9/9/72 and 11/17/72, between 11/17/72 and 1/23/73, between 1/23/73 and 3/19/73 (etc)? Sorry, we don’t have your [whatever].
When I was a kid and new Scout IIs were all over the place, I misread the bigger sibling’s badge as TRAVELA II, pronounced “TRAV-ə-lə TWO”.
And I think IH might’ve got the credit they deserved for their compressed-rust construction if only the Chev Vega (I mispronounced “VEDGE-uh”) and suchlike hadn’t stolen so much of that thunder.
But the iconic truck in my mind’s eye will always be this. That is what a truck is supposed to look (and sound) like, full stop.
While I agree that a Butterfly hood Loadstar is the iconic MD truck especially with a driven front axle I have to disagree about the parts interchangeability of IH’s particularly in the 70’s. IH didn’t have the money to offer to many different versions of any given item. For example the 1210 and 1310 shared brake drums even though the 1310 came with 12 x 3 (358) shoes and slightly larger wheel cyls than the 1210’s 12 x 2 1/2 (357) shoes. Now where some of the confusion can set in is that you could “1 up” your 1210 with the 3″ shoes up front, in the rear or front and rear like a 1310. There is also a huge overlap in parts for the square body trucks and the SII. Things like gauges, switches door handles and of course lots of power train.
You’re taking my comment too literally. “Brake drum” was a random part name for the purpose of illustrating the point.
But what you say just isn’t true, there are very few cases where IH had that made before/after a certain date issue. Even when that is the case sometimes it actually represents the change to the “new” truck as IH didn’t do traditional model year changes until it was forced upon them by gov’t regulations. So sometimes that meant that there was a relevant cut off date in mid year but the model designation also changed. For example the D1x00 trucks stopped production in March 1966 and the 1x00A trucks started in April 1966. The model is the important thing.
The big issue is that IH just had that many more choices particularly when it came to power train. For example there are years that you had the choice of the regular 3sp, a HD 3sp, close or wide ratio 4sp, direct or OD 5sp in your pickup or Travelall. Dana 44 or Semi Floating Dana 60 rear in your 1/2 ton? Dana 30 or Dana 44 front axle in your early Scout II? And those things were not because they were just building with what they had those were items that were ordered for a specific purpose and resulted in an up charge to the buyer.
Awright, as you wish. My experience working at the wrecking yard was that many IH vehicles had very long lists of from date/to date interchangeability constraints.
The Scout, to me, came off as rather crude in comparison to its chief competitors, the Jeep CJ and original Ford Bronco (which is really saying something). Coupled with how road salt would quickly take its toll on the bodies, it seems like its death was inevitable in any kind of economic downturn. In fact, even if IH could have hung in there a bit longer, the Scout just didn’t seem to be the right type of SUV that was gaining traction at the time, i.e., smaller four-doors like the Cherokee and Explorer. Was there any kind of refresh or major model update on the books at IH for the Scout if they had kept going, or were they content to just keep building the same vehicle with minor upgrades (like the rectangular headlights)?
Design work had started on the Scout III which should have debuted as a 1981 model. However that work was put on hold and they worked on the composite bodied SSV or Scout Supplemental Vehicle which was sitting on the Scout II chassis. Several prototypes were produced, some crash tested, others shown and even loaned to 4×4 focused publications. The had almost completed an arrangement with Coachman industries, the motorhome mfg, to produce the bodies and do final assembly. IH would have provided the complete stripped chassis. There were also a number of other designs floated for the SIII including a mini-van complete with dual sliding doors. The sketches I’ve seen pictures of looked very Aerostar like.
I learned to drive a stick shift in my uncle’s 1970 Scout 800A. 304, 3 spd manual and 4WD. His 1st Scout was a ’64 Scout 80 with the 152 cu in 4.
I thought the ’65 to 68 Scouts were just referred to as 800’s. They had tan or grayish dash board with matching grayish pads on them. ’69’s and ’70’s were 800A’s. The ’71 800B was a rare partial year as the Scout II came out mid year. The 800A’s and 800B’s had a body colored dash with a black pad on them.
I thought the ’69 800A’s had round reflectors as side markers. 1970 800A’s (like my uncle’s) as well as 800B’s had rectangular reflectors that lit up.
That 304 engine in my uncle’s Scout was one of the coolest toughest engines I ever heard at idle and around town. It was so loud on the highway but it just sounded like you could put that thing in 4WD low and hook it to a redwood tree and pull the tree down. Obviously not but I thought it was awesome! They could handle anything but road salt. These were actually quite popular where I grew up in northeast Wisconsin. My uncle had a few friends who owned them too.
I remember seeing Scouts (Scout 80’s?) used as tugs for pulling luggage carts at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. They were also converted to LP gas and used in caves
for some mining operations. I think these had no tops, doors or maybe even windshields too.
I`m surprised that no one mentioned that International Scouts and Terras were built with a type of experimental metal to make them lighter. Well it didn`t go well and International offered replacement metal as part of the warranty. That`s what I read once on a forum somewhere. By the way I have a 1978 Scout Terra. Runs good and almost unstoppable. But the poor things body is about to fall apart. To much Missouri salt.
I’m from the suburbs where folks didn’t drive anything like this unless it was making them money. So the only place I ever saw a Scout was as a snow plow rig.I would say Scout was more popular as a snow plow rig than Jeep CJ was.
In Wisconsin these were very popular for hunters and fishermen as well. I remember International briefly brought out a model called the Scout Aristocrat. It had a nicer interior and carpeting. My uncle told me there was no way he would get one. International was ahead of their time with this model.
My uncle was a hunter and fisherman. He wanted vinyl seats and rubber floor mats. Something his wet Labrador Retriever and any fish and game he had too. And that was the what his friends thought too. They all had nicer cars for other activities.
My favorite sports team names are those named for something indigenous to the city, like Baltimore Orioles or San Francisco 49ers. Such names can become problematic if the owners decide to move to a different location though. That’s how you wind up with oddities like Utah Jazz, a name that made sense for its original location in New Orleans which is considered the birthplace of the musical genre. When I see names like that, I know they must have originated somewhere else. One team I was sure had never moved was the Detroit Pistons. Detroit is the Motor City, so it made sense to name the team after a crucial engine part, right? So I was quite shocked to learn just a few years ago that the Pistons actually originated in Fort Wayne and was named for a piston manufacturer, and was just a happy coincidence that the name worked even better in the city it relocated to. (Fort Wayne was apparently too small a market to profitably support an NBA team).
I’ve long been a bit confused about the IH brand name – the company was usually referred to as “International Harvester” but the trucks just say “International” on them. Which is correct? It’s like that period in the late 1960s when American Motors didn’t want to be “Rambler” anymore, but hadn’t really phased in “AMC” yet either.
The International Harvester COMPANY built International BRAND trucks from 1914 until 1985. In 1985 International Harvester Company RE-NAMED themselves (and sold their IH name to Case) as Navistar and continues to sell International BRAND today.
I thought I had commented the first time around, but back in the mid-80’s a friend had one, with all of the various tops and trim bits so he could convert it from pickup to SUV. It was 345 with 727. It’s visible in the background behind my Ranger, in a picture about 1/4 of the way down my own COAL. https://www.curbsideclassic.com/cars-of-a-lifetime/my-cars-of-a-lifetime-43-years-of-mostly-mundane-motoring/ (Sorry, I had neglected to create links for the photo’s in my COAL).
And in true CC Effect mode, I saw a Terra pickup a few blocks from my house the day before yesterday, on the road under its own power.
Terra is not a word typically used often in English. Terror is a much more commonly used word. Regional accents in New England make Terra and terror the same. The mind relates to the more familiar word and thinks International Terror. Not an ideal image.
They should have gone with Terrastar, to go along with Loadstar, Fleetstar, Transtar, Paystar etc.
Remember a “faux wooded” , blue one ((like in the ad)) deiving round my home town.
I just bought the exact truck pictured in CT 2 days ago– curious where it came from and how much it was listed for when this was posted
My grandpa bought that truck when it was new in Bloomington, Indiana.