OLDMACKS
Sixty-Six Years of the Bulldog Breed
Every old Mack carries the same story in its bones: a family shop that outbuilt everyone, a war that gave it a name, and a dog that never let go. Here is that story, year by year.
- 1900
Three brothers, one bus
Jack, Gus and Willie Mack finish their first motor vehicle at the family’s wagon shop in Brooklyn — a twenty-passenger sightseeing bus known as Old Number One, widely counted among the first successful motor buses in America. It stayed in service for nearly two decades, which set the tone for everything that followed.
- 1905
The move to Allentown
The growing Mack Brothers Motor Car Company moves its works to Allentown, Pennsylvania. Mack trucks have been built in the Lehigh Valley ever since — the 1918 photograph on our front page was taken a few blocks from the plant.
- 1914
Model AB — the first volume Mack
The AB is Mack’s first standardized, series-built model: a light-and-medium duty chassis that would serve grocers, breweries, fire brigades and the Army for over two decades, with some 55,000 built through 1936.
- 1916
Model AC goes to war
The blunt-hooded, chain-drive Model AC appears — and goes straight into the Great War. Thousands serve the American and British forces hauling shells, rations and bridging steel through the mud of France. British soldiers, so the story goes, swore the snub-nosed Mack had “the tenacity of a bulldog,” and the name never came off.
- 1922
Mack Trucks, Inc.
The company takes the name it still carries — Mack Trucks, Inc. — and makes the bulldog its official emblem, stamping it proudly on the sides of every AC.
- 1932
Masury carves the dog
Chief engineer Alfred Fellows Masury, laid up in the hospital, passes the time carving a bulldog figure — then patents it. The little chrome dog has stood on the hood of every Mack since; a gold bulldog marks a truck with an all-Mack engine and drivetrain.
- 1938
Mack builds its own diesels
Mack begins producing diesel engines of its own design — the start of the road that leads to the famous END673 Thermodyne and the company’s reputation for building the whole truck, nose to tail.
- 1941
Back to war
Through the Second World War, Mack delivers tens of thousands of heavy military trucks to the Allied forces — prime movers, tank transporters and the rugged NO-series 7½-ton 6×6 — while the bulldog badge becomes a byword for anything unstoppable: “built like a Mack truck.”
- 1953
The B-Model arrives
Round-fendered, broad-shouldered and honest as a handshake, the B-Model debuts alongside Mack’s END673 Thermodyne diesel. To drivers it was simply the truck — and to collectors it still is. About 127,000 are built over thirteen years.
- 1966
The last B rolls out
Production of the B-Model ends after some 127,000 trucks, succeeded by the R-series. The antique era closes — and the preservation era begins, in barns, at truck shows, and on pages like this one.
