OTA Dispatch Issue 2 2020

30 Oregon Trucking Associations, Inc. Oregon Truck Dispatch Nosler Produce and the First Peterbilt The tall, angular genius that designed a better hunting bullet bought a fleet of trucks from the man who helped to revolutionize the trucking industry. By Gary Lewis IF YOU HAVE heard the name John Nosler it is probably because John Nosler developed the first premium hunting bullet, a projectile that changed hunting around the world. His innovation was the Partition bullet, hand-built it in a truck repair shop in a place called Ashland, Oregon. Before the Nosler Partition, there was Nosler Produce, but to understand that we have to go to Reedsport, Oregon, and a fledgling automobile dealership called Nosler Ford. John Nosler quit high school when his father lost everything he had in the stock market crash of 1929. Young John went to work at a Ford dealer in Los Angeles, sweeping floors (at first for no pay), fixing cars and selling used cars, and soon he had enough cash set aside to get married and get into racing on weekends. He was wrenching on Ford Model As and Model Bs, and one day, he figured there was something wrong with the crankshaft in the new Model B engine. He fixed it. And his car started winning races. Lots of races. And Ford noticed. Nosler, 19-years-old at the time, allowed FoMoCo to take a look at the crankshaft he had developed. Dearborn eventually replaced all their parts stock with the Nosler-designed crankshaft. It was that favor John Nosler called in years later that resulted in him opening a Ford dealership in Reedsport, Oregon. John and Louise Nosler, Louise’s sister and little Ron Nosler headed north in a Model A to start their new life in Oregon. Ford had a program with a credit company to help people buy cars. A reasonably priced 1936 model car might be bought for $25 down and $25 per month. The problem with that arrangement was the dealer sold the loan to a credit company, but the dealer was still responsible for the deal. “I had sold over a hundred cars by the time the unions organized in Reedsport,” John Nosler said some 60 years later, looking back on those days. The lumber workers wanted a union and when the unions organized, sawmills in small towns up and down the Oregon coast just shut the doors and turned out the lights. Stacks of lumber were left to rot in the mill yards. And the cars started coming back to the Ford dealership. “I paid all the bills I could and took my Ford cars and trucks over to Eugene to try to sell them there,” Nosler said. The country was still in the grip of the Great Depression and cars were hard to sell anywhere, even at half their worth. Nosler called a friend in southern California, whose dad had enough money to take over the dealership. With what money Nosler had left, he put a down payment on a 1937 Ford truck that was sitting on the showroom floor and drove it to Ashland where a brother and a Nosler cousin were living. In those days, San Francisco had a produce consignment market. A packing house would consign crates of lettuce, celery and potatoes and sell to the highest bidder. John Nosler and his cousin founded Nosler Produce and began buying produce at the farmers’ markets in Stockton and Sacramento and then drove the loads north where they sold to grocery stores in Oregon. As soon as Nosler Produce got a little traction, John could see he would need a bigger truck. “At that time, I kept a buyer in the San Francisco market. I told him to look around for a bigger truck when he didn’t have anything else to do. He heard about a man named Peterman who was beginning to build trucks for the highway.” T.A. Peterman had been a logger in the Northwest where the rivers were used to float timber down out of the high country. It was dangerous work, and Peterman could see there would be another way to take the lumber out if good roads could be built in the back country. The trucks of the day were not up to the task, so he started rebuilding surplus military vehicles, improving his designs with each new truck. And those were the kinds of trucks John Nosler reckoned would help him bring fresh produce to more and more grocers in southern Oregon and northern California. “I bought the first or second Peterbilt with trailer ever made,” John Nosler said. “I could haul 20 tons with it, while the most the Fords could haul was seven or eight tons.” Some of the first Partition bullets ever built. Hand-made by John Nosler, they were packaged by Louise Nosler in their Ashland, Oregon, kitchen. PHOTO BY GARY LEWIS