I get an added bonus as the merriest time of the year (for me at least) draws nigh, for this is when the heralds of the season (usually by email) announce the availability of 2014 truck calendars.
The art of the truck calendar is a topic I’ve frequently touched on this space – most recently in the case of master photographer Roger Snider, whose latest epic creation, dubbed Chrome & Elegance, also generated an interesting side journey to meet the legendary Pierre Jacot, the original creative director of the Peterbilt "Class Pays" advertising campaigns and calendar shoots from 1975 to 1994 as a partner in a small advertising agency located in San Francisco.
Today, though, we’ll take a look at the fifth installment of the Sioux City Truck Sales (SCTS) dealer group’s annual truck opus, crafted by Tom Schoening, the company’s marketing and communications manager and former journalist who serves as the SCTS calendar's photographer, designer, and chief critic.
[SCTS, by the way, will mark its 60th anniversary in 2014, with Peterbilt Motor Co. notching its 75th anniversary next year as well; an interesting confluence of milestones to say the least.]
Schoening told me by email that when SCTS launches its new web site in 2014, truck enthusiasts will be able to view photos from all five calendars online. In the meantime, you can visit www.pbtruck.com/calendar to see what Tom’s cooked up for the 2014 edition.
He stressed that SCTS’s calendars are free to customers at the company’s five Peterbilt locations – Sioux City, Des Moines, Council Bluffs, Iowa, along with Norfolk and the Lincoln Peterbilt Parts Store in Nebraska – while supplies last.
SCTS’s 2014 calendar also features a handful of contributed photos from employees and others, as well as Tom’s own work, chronicling an interesting collection of both brand-spanking new models as well as several “classic” units still hard at work on the roads and in the fields.
Tom told me that the cover for this year’s calendar came from a Photoshop combination of a Peterbilt “stock picture” and the Christmas tree put up by the service department at SCTS’s Sioux City facility in 2012.
He also has a knack for sharing some interesting “tidbits” as he calls them the truck photographs; and the pictures gracing the 2014 calendar are no exception.
“The delivery truck for the month of June offers an interesting tidbit,” Tom told me. “The customer used his existing box to be placed on the new truck heavy-haul custom chassis. If I recall correctly, the Peterbilt of Sioux City Body Shop made the ‘box’ look like new again.”
Then there’s the picture he snapped of the brand-new Peterbilt Model 579 working for the Van Diest Supply Co., a major agricultural chemical supplier & transporter in north central Iowa. “I got a ride by a forklift truck, standing in a ‘man-lift’ basket, to get the elevated view,” he told me.
Needless to say, Tom’s work celebrates some pretty interesting iron performing all sorts of jobs out in his area of the country and is definitely worth a look over on SCTS's web site.
