Now There’s Something You Don’t See Every Day! : The 1948 Crosley Wagon

In my travels across the Heartland each week I’m always on the lookout for vintage cars, trucks, and tractors. On quiet back roads where traffic is dependably local there is much to be seen for those who take the time to look. I travel country roads as much as possible while motoring back and forth to my part time jobs.

It was summer of 2024 when I was out one day driving toward Manhattan on the old National Road and on up toward Greencastle, Indiana. On this same drive I’ve seen fjord horses and Studebaker trucks, but it was still a surprise when I saw the little vehicle shown in the photo above. I recognized it instantly as a Crosley. (Images of the Crosley)

Growing up in the Heartland in the 1950s and 1960s about 75 miles from Cincinnati, Ohio meant that we took certain things for granted. There was Crosley Broadcasting that operated the dominant radio station in the area, the 50,000 watt clear channel station WLW at 700 on the AM dial. With a 50KW transmitter (it had been 500,000 watts during the war!) and clear channel status it had no rivals on the airwaves at that frequency.

Its reach was incredible coming in loud and clear all across the eastern half of the United States and much of eastern Canada. Crosley put WLW on the air in the early 1920s as a radio pioneer. My folks listened to Sunday programs like Billy Graham and The Lutheran Hour on that station, and late at night they sometimes listened to a program called Moon River that featured sleepy music and poetic readings meant to induce sleep for its listeners. Radio serials and soap operas came across the air waves in the 1940s and 1950s, too, often on a Crosley-built radio.

The Crosley name seemed to be everywhere, so I paid little attention to it. Crosley radios were common along with Crosley refrigerators. When as kids we became sensible enough to become fans of the closest major league baseball team, we had already learned that the Cincinnati Reds played at Crosley Field. Powel Crosley (1886-1961) owned the team from 1934 until his death. That was where I attended all my early baseball games.

My little league team went there in Pete Rose’s first or second season, sitting high up in the upper deck cheap seats far down the right field line. Rose was playing right field that day, so our team hooted and yelled, trying to get his attention while he was right in front of us. He ignored us for a while, but each time he came back out to the outfield we would start in again. We had gotten pretty loud about halfway through the game when we noticed that he looked up at us, looked around, hid his hand in his glove and flipped us the bird. We loved it.

Another great memory came at Crosley Field in the summer of 1963. It was Stan Musial’s final season. My dad took me to a game just to see him play. Although he was a St. Louis Cardinal, all the boys my age adored him as one of the great hitters of all time. We copied his bent-over batting posture at the plate in our daily softball games during our school lunch hours. I remember the roar of the crowd that night when he came up to bat and we saw him drive a clean single out of the reach of the infielders. Rose played that night, too. What days! Crosley made that possible.

For most of his life Powel Crosley aspired to become an automaker, and he did something about it, too. When I made it to junior high school I had a friend whose family was in the trucking business, hauling crushed limestone out of a quarry less than a mile from my home. Being in the trucking business meant that they had to maintain and work on dump trucks.

Since they worked on trucks they also worked on cars. I rode my Schwinn Corvette over to their house out in the country one time. My friend, even at that age before we had drivers’ licenses, had already driven everything with wheels. As part of the day’s visit we went out to their garage. Parked side by side were two little Crosleys.

He opened the garage door and said ‘get in!’ He started one up and drove me around in it on their driveway, turning around near the road. It was equipped with a three-speed manual transmission and had no hard top, as I recall. We took another run out to the end of the driveway, and as we went up the gentle slope he shifted into third gear and kept going. He pointed to his foot on the accelerator, which was all the way to the floor. The little car putt-putted obediently up the slope without missing a beat. Imagine having your own set of toy cars, made nearby!

Crosley made a whole line of little vehicles that were lightweight and economical, but like the economy compacts that Studebaker built in the early ‘60s, the driving public wasn’t quite ready for them yet. Why look for a car that delivered great fuel economy when gas was thirty-three cents a gallon, and sometimes less? I even saw them on golf courses now and then, in use as golf carts. They were quiet and did no harm to the fairways in those days before golf carts became battery-powered.

Crosley made radios, refrigerators, automobiles that average people could afford. When I saw the little Crosley wagon that day it gave me the opportunity to honor one of the unsung heroes of industry from the Ohio Valley.

So keep your eyes open when driving across the Heartland. Say, there’s an old Crosley! Now there’s something you don’t see every day!

History of Crosley Here and Here.

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