10/09/2026
We ❤️❤️ the Jones family!!
A tornado tore up the barn this 1950 Chevrolet 4100 wrecker was parked beside, but the truck came through with little more than a few scuffs from flying debris. That close call is ultimately how Jerry Jones finally got his hands on it.
The Chevrolet had been a wrecker from the beginning. Sandusky Chevrolet in Kingfisher, Oklahoma, rigged it new in 1950 for the dealership’s own use, fitting it with a Holmes 460E split-boom wrecker unit. Jerry says the truck also carries a “cradle snatcher,” an early axle-lifting arrangement he compares to what the towing industry would later know as an underreach.
“Everybody thought that was something new in the seventies,” Jerry says, pointing out that wreckers were lifting disabled vehicles from beneath decades earlier. Combined with the Chevy’s Deluxe five-window cab, the period Holmes equipment makes the truck an especially interesting survivor.
After Sandusky Chevrolet went out of business, the old Chevy entered another chapter of working life. Someone used it for several years hauling propane tanks, and the truck picked up its share of wear along the way. By then it was simply a utilitarian white work truck, a long way from the showpiece it would eventually become.
Jerry, who founded Jerry’s Wrecker Service in Guthrie, Oklahoma, in 1974, had tried to buy the truck years earlier but couldn’t make a deal. Then, around 1998, his son Jason spotted it in the local classified ads. The owners needed money to rebuild their storm-damaged barn, and this time they were ready to sell.
As far as old iron goes, the truck was remarkably complete. Still, Jerry stripped it to the frame and started over. The components were sandblasted, the body was straightened, the original inline-six engine was overhauled. There wasn’t much to restore inside; the cab was basically seat covers, cardboard door panels, and a headliner. The Holmes towing equipment remained with it and still worked, though years of sitting had left some of the components frozen and in need of cleaning and freeing up.
“Like rebuilding anything else, it just took time,” Jerry says. “Everything went together pretty good.”
After roughly two years of work, the restoration was finished in 2000, and the truck returned to the road as "Unit One," wearing Chevrolet Sunset Gold and Brockway Red. The color combination distinguishes the family's vintage vehicle collection, which also includes a 1946 Flxible Clipper bus that Jerry converted into a motorhome and a 1949 Chevrolet 5700 cabover paired with a 1947 MHS car hauler.
And it isn’t a trailer queen. Jerry, an ATHS member, still takes the truck out on a run now and again, and once used it to tow his 1952 Chevy from Guthrie to a car show in Oklahoma City, roughly 30 miles each way. He has also shown the wrecker at ATHS National Conventions, most recently at the 2026 event in Springfield, Missouri.
The reaction?
“Oh, it draws a crowd,” he says.
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Welcome to Tow Hooks! Wreckers have played a big part in trucking history, helping to keep rigs on the road, and it's time they got the spotlight. Watch for more here and in Wheels of Time starting in January/February. Join ATHS to get six issue a year of our award-winning magazine delivered to your mailbox. Learn more at ATHS.org/Joinnow
