Limo Meets Labor: 1974 IH Travelette - PickupTrucks.com
In early 1974, an oil executive in Oklahoma ordered a new pickup — that’s right, a pickup, not a luxury car. You don’t show up to the oil fields in a limo if you want to command respect from roughnecks, but oil execs sometimes needed to carry VIPs. Showing up to an oil rig in a limo-long, two-tone IH 200 series pickup is a base hit with the roughneck crowd. And since it’s powered by IH’s biggest light-truck V-8, the 392-cubic-inch four-barrel with factory dual exhausts likely gets you to third base. In early 1974, IH trucks were on the way up. The new D-Series pickups that debuted in 1969 were light-years ahead of the previous generation for technical features and the available comfort and convenience features. IH fell far behind the Big Three in bringing its trucks up the comfort-option food chain. The company had long built some of the toughest light trucks available, but they were farmers’ trucks, workman’s trucks — trucks not well-suited to the American pickups’ growing role as the ordinary family’s recreation vehicle (the second or third... Visibility was another reason for IH’s single-digit light-truck market share. Farmers and commercial people knew where to find an IH truck, but John Q. Public’s usual reply was, “International what. Source: news.pickuptrucks.com
