David Greenlees over at The Old Motor recently posted this photo of a pair of eight-wheeled trucks – one apparently a school bus, the other a stakeside – and wondered aloud who built them and why. I think we have an answer.
When David mentioned that the photo was possibly taken in San Francisco, I immediately thought of the eight-wheeled whatzit that we ran in Lost and Found in Hemmings Classic Car a couple years ago (see HCC #56 and HCC #59). That photo was of an eight-wheeled automobile parked in front of the Palace Hotel in San Francisco in the late 1920s. One of our readers, John Perala, of Richmond, California, believed the Lost and Found car was a prototype built by the Eight Wheel Motor Vehicle Company of San Francisco. Intriguingly, we dug through our references and found a number of patents assigned to the Eight Wheel Motor Vehicle Company that were originally filed by Rollie B. Fageol, brother to the founders of the Fageol truck and bus company. In fact, in one of those patents (RE17889, a 1930 reissue of Rollie’s 1928 U.S. Patent No. 1,692,891), Rollie Fageol noted that he preferred eight-wheel configurations to six-wheeled configurations.
All that said, could these two eight-wheelers be Fageols? They certainly share some characteristics with production Fageol trucks of that era. And the bus looks an awful lot like a design that Rollie Fageol patented (outside of Eight Wheel) in 1921. (see U.S. Patent D59,728) This merits further research…