[mr48chev]

54's had several things going that the earlier trucks didn't including cloth covered seats on the deluxe model. I think they might have appealed to a lot of guys who were in position to buy a pickup as a second vehicle to drive to work rather than as a work vehicle used for work.

Around here the 47/53 survived pretty well and you see plenty of them around and a lot of them got used by farmers as irrigating trucks up into the 90's having since been replaced with mini trucks.

I'd agree on the cloth wire thing causing a lot of the earlier trucks to be parked and left to the elements. the truck that is donating the back half of my cab had a pretty serous under dash fire at one time. The wiring on my 48 was shot when I bought it in 1973.

Still for individual areas you have to figure the economy of that area at a certain time and also what new vehicle dealerships were in the area at the time and how aggressively they advertised or worked to sell their product along with what the "local guys" considered to be the good truck at the time.

In the early 50's this town had a Chevrolet dealer, one that sold International, GMC, Buick and Pontiac, a Ford dealership and a Dodge dealership. You are likely to see any of those trucks still out on farms or ranches if you hit the back roads. The hop ranches used up a lot of the AD 1-1/2 ton trucks in the area shortening the frame up to make bob tail trucks to pull the hop trailers because the nose and cab slid though the hops real smoothly when they picked the hops. Some hop yards had 30 or 40 of them around.

A town about 50 miles from me has more old Internationals around than anything else as they had an International dealer there for close to 40 years. I worked for that shop for a year or so in the 90's and worked on a lot of those trucks. A lot of the 1-1/2 and 2 tons only got used for under 3 months a year hauling apples to the warehouses and sat in an equipment shed the other nine months.