Trucks have always been a big part of what we do at West Park Motors. Today most of the trucks we sell range from ½ to 1 ton, come pretty nicely finished and are often used for pleasure or leisure. In the early days of West Park, many of the trucks we sold were in the medium and heavy duty range … they were farm trucks, gravel trucks, cement trucks, highway tractors and more. Ray and Bob remember the peak farm truck era of 1973 – 1976. Wheat had gone from under $1.00 a bushel in 1969 to $5 or $6 a bushel in 1973; Flax was at $12 a bushel … and local farmers wanted new 3 – 5 ton trucks. West Park scoured all of Canada and the U.S. looking for trucks – and found places around North America where the crop was not as good or where dealers had excess inventory. Load after load of new 3 ton trucks arrived on our lot in those days; welder Jake Zacharias lengthened or shortened the frames as needed and then they went to Midland, Loadline, Dick Stoesz and others to have boxes installed.

 This is a load of trucks arriving at West Park in the 60’s. Some of us on staff were lucky enough to fly down to Oshawa, Ontario and drive them home in loads of 3 as shown. That was a pretty big trip in those days … and a pretty big thrill. In the 70’s and 80”s most of our new vehicles were factory ordered and many, many customer drove home from the factory in their new cars as well.

Trucks were always a big part of our business. When we added on to our building in the 70’s, our new service shop included 5 trucks bays on the east side … and most times those bays were full of trucks.

We sold a lot of medium and heavy duty trucks in those days. Early commercial customers included Ben Giesbrecht at Altona Concrete, John, Harry and Bill of Derksen Trucking, CV0 (now Bunge) who had a whole fleet of trucks on the road in those days, Jake and Edwin of Harder’s Trucking, Friesen’s Corporation, Phil Toews and Glen Wiebe from Altona, Wiebe Bros. out of Neuhorst, Abe Kehler from Rosetown, Abe Dyck at Altona Freightways had a large fleet of trucks and on and on. Evenings and Saturday’s our service parking was usually full of trucks.