Words: John "Gunner" Gunnell
According to Don Schultz of La Crescent, Minn., there used to be three 1937 Chevy sedan deliveries in his hometown of La Crosse, Wis. Which is odd, since only 7,000 of the trucks were ever built. “A lot of grocery stores had them,” said Schultz. “So we used to call them ‘Grocery Getters.’”
The veteran hot rodder acquired one of the trucks 27 years ago, but it did not come from a grocery store. “The La Crosse Sign Company owned it,” says Schultz. “They had ladder racks on it. They put planks across the ladder racks, but they didn’t always walk on the planks. I spent two months taking dents caused by sign installers out of the roof of the truck.”
Schultz bought the truck at a junk car auction in the early 1990s. He paid $700 for it back then and figures it’s worth about $35,000 today. It was rusty looking, but it wasn’t really rusty. It was painted red and had maroon fenders; “La Crosse Sign Company” was written on the sides. Schultz stripped the old paint and lettering off and, with the help of a friend, squirted new paint on the truck.
Originally, the sedan delivery sheet metal was transferred to a Chevy S-10 pickup frame. “I didn’t like the looks of the front end hanging down,” Schultz recalls. “It took two days to build the truck on the S-10 frame and about an hour to take it off and throw the frame away.” The original frame was re-installed along with a dropped front axle.
To power the sedan delivery, Schultz picked a Chevy 350-cid V-8 that had been bored 030-inch oversize to make it a 355. The transmission is an automatic out of a Camaro. It also has the Camaro’s rear end. The truck goes down the road quite well, according to Schultz. He has put about 15,000 miles on it, most of those from going to car shows like Mississippi Mayhem (www.mississippimayhem.com), where we caught up with him.
Schultz did construction work for a living and could only work on the truck in the winter. He spent 26 years working on it on and off. Because of the model’s low production total, Schultz had a hard time finding the hood ornament, which differs from the one used on 1937 Chevrolet passenger cars. However, when he found a new-in-the-box truck ornament at the Iola Car Show (www.iolaoldcarshow.com), it cost him only $5.
Mississippi Mayhem is still Schultz’s favorite event at which to show the sedan delivery. “You can sit here and just relax and enjoy the day,” he notes. “You don’t worry about bugs or whether your ride has a paint chip. It’s just an all ‘driver’ show; there’s no ‘trailer queens.’”