But as devotees celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Scout’s introduction, evidence in Barbara Marsh’s classic book “A Corporate Tragedy: The Agony of International Harvester,” points to a different culprit.
She and others indicate the cause of the Scout’s demise was neither the strike nor the quality of the vehicle itself. It was, instead, an IH business model that, although capable of developing the vehicle and identifying a new market, was unable to compete with Detroit’s Big Three automakers once they followed suit.
A good start
“Naming a new vehicle is a black art,” Tom Brownell and Pat Ertel write in their “International Truck Color History.”
“When the name fits, it gives the vehicle instant identification.”
The Scout’s name came spontaneously as a nickname for the project assigned to Ted Ornas, head of design for International’s light trucks, the man who famously sketched the Scout on the kitchen table of his Fort Wayne, Ind., home.
Once rights to the name were purchased from a Canadian firm, Brownell and Ertel note the Scout was introduced in 1961 in a way that helped to explore its market niche.
“Purchased with the pickup cap, the Scout became a compact, economical-to-operate pickup truck. Covered with a full-length cap, the Scout became a mini-Travelall. Ordered without a top, the Scout became a fun-to-drive runabout. Fitted with four-wheel drive ... the Scout was equally at home on- or off-road. With two-wheel drive the Scout offered both economy of purchase and operation, as well as utility.”
A month after production began, a second shift was added at the Fort Wayne assembly plant, and by year’s 35,000 had been made “making it the hottest selling vehicle in International’s history,” the authors say.
A bad omen
Now thought of as a medium and large truck maker, International Harvester for decades made ½- and ¾-ton pickup trucks that served farmers and other working people well.
But Fred Crismon writes that was changing the year the Scout came out. In “International Trucks,” he calls 1961 “probably the beginning of the end for the light line of trucks.”
Not all truck owners weren’t buying “for the primary goal of carrying the maximum load allowed,” Crismon writes. “Many were just using them as another family car.”
And that meant people shopped for them where they found their family cars — not at the heavy truck ships where IH sold its line.
International saw its share of that market drop from 7 percent to 4 percent during the 1960s.
Then in March of 1969, with Ford’s Bronco already succeeding, Chevrolet announced the coming of its Blazer. The photo with the story announcing its introduction in the New York Times showed a mother, child and the family dog, signifying the change in the market.
Another try
The trends were not lost on IH. In “A Corporate Tragedy,” Marsh reports that then top IH executive Brooks McCormick, a great grand nephew of reaper king Cyrus McCormick, hired Keith Mazurek from Chrysler of Canada.
A former company division head told Marsh that Mazurek was “the feistiest of them all. He was the only one that created any waves in an elephantine thing like International Harvester.”
William Callahan, then vice president for trucks, told Marsh consultants had told IH there was “a chance” to make the line profitable, but “not a very good chance.”
“The reason was simple,” Marsh reports.
To make pickups, Ford, GM and Chrysler didn’t have to reinvent the wheel, or much else.
Because their pickups “shared the same engines, chassis components and a slew of parts like windshield wipers, window regulator arms and radios with their vehicle brothers, Detroit could achieve economies of scale by spreading their costs across their high volume auto business.
“In contrast,” she writes, “Harvester’s light trucks shared components with lower-volume medium-duty trucks and ... couldn’t make money on them.”
Mazurek, who arrived with car company experience, would try.
Another obstacle
“During his first couple years at Harvester,” writes Marsh, “Mazurek signed up auto dealers who lacked a light-duty truck line. The trucks particularly suited General Motors’ Pontiac and Buick dealers, who wanted small trucks to peddle against Chevrolet.”
The move addressed another problem Marsh speaks to: “Neither (IH) farm equipment dealers nor Harvester’s heavy duty truck salesmen were inclined to promote small trucks, preferring to devote themselves to big-ticket equipment.”
Mazurek succeeded, to a degree. But when he met the goal of selling 80,000 light trucks, another obstacle appeared.
“We got our volume up and cost down,” Keith Potter, IH’s chief financial officer from 1968-79, told Marsh, “but in the meantime, the inflation rate had started to bite us .... Even though we’d achieved those volume goals, we still weren’t making ... money.”
So, he said, “we got out.”
A different theory
In their “International Truck Color History,” Tom Brownell and Patrick Ertel forward a different theory.
“The actual explanation (for the demise of the light line) lies in corporate politics which pitched the big-truck guys against the little-truck guys. In a free-for-all scramble for product development capital, the big truck guys won out.”
Their argument has merit, particularly given that the big truck-small truck factions weren’t the only contenders for IH capital. International’s farm equipment division, despite having twice the sales as John Deere in the early 1970s, had less than half the Deere profit margin.
But Marsh says all were part of a “30-year legacy of management sins” at IH, whose “sales-oriented management, convinced that Harvester could be all things to all people, had presided over an ill conceived pursuit of a slew of capital hungry businesses that sapped the company’s financial strength.”
There was simply too little capital to go around.
While calling the light line trucks “the best of their kind,” Crismon says “there were a lot of very cogent reasons behind dropping (them).
“Lighter, more economical and more luxurious vehicles in the weight class were what was wanted, and to even begin to compete with Ford, GM and Dodge, International would have had to totally redesign their light line.
“Fuel economy was a big issue,” Crismon adds, “and IHC’s light line was a thirsty bunch.”
A good record
When the light line gone, the Scout was on its own.
The first major redesign in 10 years had brought the Scout II on the market in 1971, and, say Brownell and Ertel, sold an impressive 30,000 vehicles. The Arab oil embargo spiked gasoline prices and cut sales to 6,714 in 1974, they add, but those rebounded to 21,366 in 1975.
To help replace the loss of the Travelall and their other light trucks that year, IH introduced the Scout Terra, a four-wheel drive pickup, and the Traveler, both of which sold well.
Sales climbed to 39,382 units in 1977, and to 44,343 in 1979. Even with advertising cutbacks and consumers’ reluctance to buy a model they knew was being discontinue, more than 30,000 Scouts were sold in its final year.
Unfortunately, in the booming market segment, IH mustered only about 1 percent of the small truck market.
What ifs
Brownell and Ertel list the “long and bitter strike between IH workers and management” as just one of the reasons the Scout production lined closed when the last vehicle rolled off the Fort Wayne production line on Oct. 21, 1980.
Its limited dealership network and advertising that ignored women were other factors noted.
“Even as the Scout was fading into history, they write, “its original designer, Ted Ornas, was trying to sell International management on a new-generation Scout (with) weight-saving composite body construction (that) .... was a decade ahead of its time.”
A lone prototype of that “Sports Enthusiast” can be seen in the Auburn Museum, Auburn, Ind.
Devotees claim that in its final years, the Scout was offering the kinds of bells and whistles that a later generation of customers would come to expect from the highly successful class of Sport Utility Vehicles.
But the problem with the Scout appears not to have been with the vehicle itself but with an IH business model that, although able to create a striking vehicle for a new market niche was ultimately unable to make money producing it.
Unfortunately scouts exploring new ground don’t always survive.
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0368.
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