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Looking Back: Kenworth pioneered “The Western Truck”

A worldwide trucking giant grew from an automobile agency in Portland, but its founders sold trucks as an afterthought.

Portland, Oregon. 1910. A year after Robert E. Peary and Matthew Henson reached the North Pole, and two years before the Titantic went down. Hauling was still being done by wagons pulled by teams of horses.

In the Northwest logging and maritime shipping frontier, financier George Gerlinger founded and funded the Stoddard-Dayton Auto Company (later Gerlinger Motor Car Co.). The agency sold Oldsmobile cars, and as an afterthought, sold Federal, Standard and Menominee trucks. Then in 1914, the company decided to build its own trucks, as much to keep its mechanics working as anything else.

Ed Hahn, one of the mechanics who worked on that first vehicle, was interviewed for the PACCAR archives in 1979, and explained, “In those days, there were so few trucks and cars and there was no union, so, as a mechanic, you had to stand around the garage and wait for work to come in. Sometimes you made five dollars a week, and sometimes you hardly made your board. Then you’d have to leave and go do other work–sawmill work or something else. So we started building that first truck to keep help around.”

These were the roots of one of the world’s great trucking manufacturers — Kenworth.

Gerlinger’s truck was completed in 1915 and was named the Gersix for the Gerlingers and the distinctive Continental engine that was probably the first six-cylinder engine in an American built truck, a truck sold as a chassis, without cab or body, to a local brick hauler.

The Gerlinger Motor Car Co. even came up with a conversion kit that weighed 1,500 pounds, sold for $270, and turned a motor car into a truck. Regardless, the company went bankrupt in 1917. The last year of the Gersix was 1922. The company was re-capitalized and re-incorporated as Ken-Worth, reflecting the last names of two of the principal stockholders.

Nonetheless, trucking was on the move in the Northwest, and the Gerlingers sold the newly named Gersix Manufacturing Co. to the company’s Seattle landlord, Edgar K. Worthington, and his partner, Captain Frederick W. Keen.

One of the partners in one of Worthington’s maritime shipping concerns was a brilliant managerial mind named Harry W. Kent, who was later associated with Worthington in Kenworth. Like Worthington, Kent was an entrepreneur, but unlike Worthington, he was a manager first and a financier second.

Kenworth struggled during Roaring Twenties

Everything took a little longer to get from the East coast to the Northwest in those days — even the prosperity of the 1920’s. The Kenworth Motor Truck Co. struggled to keep a significant amount of cash flowing through the till.

Luckily, though, along had come one Vernon Smith, a master salesman. He’d received his early training at a Diamond-T distributorship in St. Louis. He sold his first truck for cash and an old one-cylinder Cadillac truck and then wrecked the trade-in on his way back to the agency.

In a short time, the skilled and crafty Vernon Smith built up sales, created a regional market for Kenworth trucks, and was successful at landing several multiple purchases and fleet orders for Kenworth.

What turned the tide as much as anything for Kenworth, next to Smith’s dynamic sales mastery, was that the Kenworth product was strong and durable, relatively inexpensive and easily financed. Once Smith was able to sell the customers, they usually came back when they needed more trucks.

The early Gersixers had to switch engines, from a six cylinder Continental engine  â€”  because they had trouble getting the continental sixes shipped in  —  to a four cylinder Buda engine. The company built stronger, more powerful, more comfortable trucks, with pneumatic tires, pressed steel frames, and an improved cab.

Vernon Smith would go out and sell some trucks with this or that specification, then he’d come back to the plant and say, “Here, I have the sale, now we have to build them.”

That was why Kenworth became known as a custom builder. The company’s engineers worked with each customer to design and produce the truck best suited to an individual’s needs, a practice that still continues, despite increased production.

Kenworth built its trucks for local demands with greater payloads being hauled up steeper grades than their eastern counterparts. In 1929, the year Harry Kent first took an active interest in the company, production soared to 223 trucks, nearly tripling the sales totals of 1924. As John Cannon, the company’s bookkeeper during the later ‘20’s recalled, “The one thing that Harry Kent did for the company was to put in a system that told us the costs of a truck that we built. He had experience in the shipbuilding business, where that kind of cost-knowledge was essential.”

“This was a big change from the way we did things before, when Vernon would sell a truck and sometimes we’d lose money and sometimes we’d make money. Kent’s system put us on a solid basis as far as our costs were concerned. We started making money about that time.”

Navigating through the crash and the Depression

Harry Kent had hardly sunk all the way down in his Kenworth president’s chair when the Stock Market crashed in 1929. Just as the prosperity of the 1920s took a little longer to get from the East to the Northwest, so did the Depression. In fact, in 1930 Kenworth opened a sales branch in Portland, introduced its first air brakes (a Westinghouse 6 cfm system in a Model 240C) and its first three-axle truck (a Model 285 to mount an unusual horizontal-axis cement mixer).

That same year, Vernon Smith sold three Model 240 dump trucks to the Department of the Interior, the first of many fleet sales to Federal agencies which were to follow during the decade. Sales reached 230 that year.

But sales dropped to 161 trucks in 1931, and the next year the Great Depression had completed the trek west, and Kenworth’s market collapsed. Production was back down to less than two per week. 

In addition, Kenworth lost the expertise and financial support of Worthington, who retired in 1931 at age 63 to enjoy his well-deserved golden years. Frederick V. Fisher, a former partner of Worthington’s, took his place, purchased part interest in the company and became vice president in 1932.

During most of the ‘30’s, with production down and repossessions up (with many buyers having to default on the payments) the used truck and service departments kept the company going through those hard times, and the crew was kept pretty much intact.

Because he was a bookkeeper, John Cannon remembered that era especially well. “Every payday was an emergency,” he said. “We would pay either Friday night or Saturday after the banks closed, and then the next Monday afternoon we would deposit a check in the bank where our payroll account was, drawn on another bank, which gave us an extra day to scrape up the money.”

New Lines introduced during the Thirties

For all the financial problems, Kenworth nonetheless continued to introduce new lines during the Depression. They started building custom chassis for the fire trucks in early 1932, and their first fire truck, a model TC-56 sold in 1932, was still on reserve service status for the Sumner, Wash., Volunteer Fire Department in 1980.

In 1932, Kenworth produced the first of several Model 240 trucks with a Fageol cab and a Kenworth hood and fenders for Consolidated Freight Lines (which later built its own trucks, which became Freightliner trucks).

Several other hybrid models were built, a sleeper cab was introduced (a model 346C Diesel), and the company started building trailers. They made everything from single-axle semis to three-axle, six-wheel trailers during the decade. All of this creative production kept money rolling through the company even while new truck sales continued to suffer.

First to install diesels as original equipment

It was in 1933 that Kenworth greatly enhanced its product by becoming the first major truck manufacturer to install diesel engines as original equipment, in the Model 146D. The first one was built for Valley Motor Express in California and had a small HA-4 Cummins engine, 100 horsepower maximum.

With money tight and times hard, rebuild orders went way up in the Depression. But with the passage of the first Motor Carrier Act, in 1935, the Interstate Commerce Commission regulated the industry and established routes and fixed rates which encouraged the growth of strong, financially capable and reliable trucking companies. Truck sales increased.

That same year, Kenworth introduced an all-aluminum hub, which was met with laughter and skepticism from most of the industry, because earlier aluminum alloys had been very brittle. But improvements in casting techniques and casting metallurgy produced an alloy on which Kenworth was willing to stake its reputation. Its lightweight, durable aluminum hubs were a total success.

In 1936, when Seattle-based Heiser Body Works closed its doors for good, some former Heiser employees convinced Kenworth to open its own cab shop, and all-aluminum cabs and hoods were the eventual result.

By 1936, Harry Kent was being opposed by some stockholders who wanted to force him out, and he convinced aviation magnate Phillip Johnson—who at age 37 had simultaneously been president of Boeing and United Air Lines—to buy out his opposition.

Johnson settled a strike at Kenworth in 1936 quickly and equitably and loaned Kenworth several hundred thousand dollars to stabilize its financial condition.

At about this time, Kenworth developed its first COE model, a bubble-nose that was extremely efficient, combined with the Cummins HB-6 diesel and the Mann 300 transmission. Several ran more than a million miles. The engineering department developed a rear axle torsion-bar suspension (the firm’s gravity-spring development that has since become a Kenworth trademark). However, World War II prevented the commencement of production until late in the war.

In 1940, the year Kenworth introduced the first all-aluminum engine block, the company finally surpassed pre-Depression sales highs by selling 226 trucks that year.

Doing its part for Uncle Sam

When the war broke out, Kenworth did its part, producing wreckers for amphibious tank battalions, as well as aircraft parts for Boeing’s B-17 “Flying Fortress” bombers, and later for the B-29 “Super Fortress” bombers.

In 1944, Kenworth produced 716 military and 217 commercial vehicles. But that same year, company director Frederick Fisher and Phil Johnson, age 49, died. Paul Pigott, owner of Pacific Car and Foundry Co., bought controlling interest in the company and made John Holmstrom, a legendary Kenworth engineer, general manager. Like Johnson, Pigott proved extremely receptive to Kenworth’s practice of innovative engineering and custom production, and he had a strong influence over Kenworth’s post-war development.

After the war, not only did Kenworth introduce several new models, it continued to diversify its operations and expand its distributor system. There were thousands of orders for new trucks in 1946. Business looked so good that to John Cannon, then the company’s treasurer and assistant general manager, it seemed too good to be true.

“I couldn’t see how these trucks would ever be paid for,” Cannon recalled later. “The dealers didn’t have the money and we didn’t have the capital to finance them.” Cannon related these fears to Pigott, and Pigott sent him on the road, confronting dealers with the problem of how they were going to finance all the orders. By the time he got a week into that trip, he said that 1,000 orders were canceled.

Still, Kenworth sold all of the trucks they could build, even turning down 2,000 orders. A new city bus was engineered and introduced, as was a new dump truck configuration.

Orders came from Aramco, the Arabian American Oil Company, to design, test and construct desert trucks for Aramco’s giant pipeline project from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean, and for use in oil exploration and refinery construction. The result was the Model 853, a big rig equipped with twin, side-by-side radiators, six-wheel drive, large flotation tires, a 300-gallon fuel tank and a powerful 318 hp Hall Scott gas engine.

The company also began to develop and sell trucks for the hardy winter service of Alaska, the Yukon, and the Alcan Highway.

“Western Truck” heads east

1949 was the first year that Kenworth exhibited a truck at an Eastern convention, at the American Trucking Associations (ATA) convention in Boston, a COE Model 521. From that point, Kenworth began making huge inroads into the domestic market along the Eastern Seaboard and eventually the South.

Better production facilities were open in Seattle. And during the 50’s, while producing earth movers and special oil-well servicing trucks, it continued to improve its highway rigs, providing more space and decreasing length and weight. Nearly all Kenworth over-the-road trucks were by this time diesel powered, and many had the patented “torsion-bar bogey” rear suspension, which saved weight and reduced maintenance.

The company continued to expand into the 1960’s. The distributorship system was one of the strongest in the U.S. during those years, and several huge parts service and supply warehouses were opened around Chicago.

Canadian-Kenworth went into full-scale production during the 1950’s, and Kenworth became a wholly owned subsidiary of Pacific Car and foundry (PACCAR). Kenworth Mexicana was established in1959.

In 1964, Kenworth sold 2,037 trucks, a new high. Manufacturing facilities expanded to meet huge orders in the U.S. and abroad. By 1969, worldwide sales reached a then-astounding 6,240 units. That figure more than doubled for 1973, but 1974 saw a big slump for every heavy-truck manufacturer due to recession and oil crisis. The next year, sales dropped to 4,881 trucks delivered.

Things got back on the rise in1976, followed by a downturn with another recession in 1980. Since then, Kenworth has come back strong, maintaining its position as one of the world’s premier truck manufacturers, with an eye on the future, but ever mindful of a proud past that goes back to the days of the Gerlingers, when pioneer truck drivers answered the call of the loggers of the Great Northwest. Back in the days when America was still a very innocent place.

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