OLDMACKS
Before the interstate, before the diesel, before the chrome dog ever sat on a hood — three brothers in a Brooklyn wagon shop built a machine that refused to quit. The trucks on these pages hauled a century: they carried the doughboys’ supplies through Flanders mud, raised the skylines of New York and Chicago, and pulled America’s freight until the word Mack stopped meaning a name and started meaning “built to last.”
How a Brooklyn Bus Became the Bulldog
In 1900 the Mack brothers — Jack, Gus and Willie — rolled their first machine out of a Brooklyn carriage works: a twenty-passenger sightseeing bus the neighborhood came to call Old Number One. It ran, and kept running, for the better part of two decades. By 1905 the operation had moved to Allentown, Pennsylvania, where Mack has built trucks ever since.
The name was made in the First World War. Mack’s blunt-nosed Model AC hauled men, shells and bridging steel for the American and British armies, and the story goes that British Tommies, watching it wade through the mud, called for “the Bulldog Mack.” The nickname stuck so hard the company put a bulldog on the radiator plate — and in 1932, chief engineer Alfred F. Masury carved the little chrome dog that has ridden on every Mack hood since.
To the men who drove them and the collectors who keep them running, the golden age arrived in 1953 with the B-Model — round-shouldered, Thermodyne-powered, and by common agreement the handsomest truck ever to work for a living. When the last one left the line in 1966, the antique era ended and the collector era began.
Three Trucks Worth Knowing
MODEL AB
| Built | some 55,000 |
| Duty | light & medium delivery |
| Note | Mack’s first standardized, volume-built model |
MODEL AC
| Built | roughly 40,000 |
| Duty | heavy haulage & war service |
| Note | earned the bulldog name in the Great War |
MODEL B
| Built | about 127,000 |
| Duty | highway tractor & vocational |
| Note | the most collected Mack of them all |
Old Iron Changes Hands Here
B-Models, flatbeds, fire trucks — see what’s on the market right now, or put your own bulldog in the column.
TRUCKS FOR SALE →the classifieds · market results · list your truck