Hess Trucks, The Holiday Tradition That Started at a Gas Station

And we’re back with our American stories. For nearly sixty years, Hess Trucks have brought smiles to children and adults up and down the East Coast. Today, we bring you the story behind this iconic brand, both from the Hess Toy Truck director and a super fan. Here’s Robbie with the story.

For many families across the country, the holiday season doesn’t start until they hear the Hess jingle come across the airwaves. These green and white toy trucks and race cars and spaceships have been found underneath Christmas trees since nineteen sixty-four. But where did this all start? Here’s Justin Meyer, director of Brand Marketing and general manager of Hess Toy Trucks, to tell us more.

I have to start at the very beginning of where the legacy is, and that is really with Leon Hess, who is the Hesse Corporation founder. Before he started the company, his family emigrated here in the early nineteen hundreds. He was born in nineteen fourteen. His father was originally a butcher, but when he came here to the States, he actually got into the coal delivery business. And as everybody knows, as you get into the twenties and the thirties, times were a little tough here in America, and people are doing what they can to make ends meet. That business went bankrupt, and Leon Hass was working for his father at the time. So here we are in the Great Depression. The family is not doing well, to be frank. But in nineteen thirty-three, when his family’s business goes bankrupt, he essentially reorganizes it and turns it from a coal business into an oil delivery business. He buys a nineteen twenty-six Chevy six hundred and fifteen-gallon tanker truck, which is very iconic, and people will recognize it because it’s a toy that we’ve produced since then and replicated that, and the original one sits in our corporate offices today. But he reorganizes the assets of his father’s bankrupt business, and he starts this house Corporation, which is really the start in nineteen thirty-three of Hess today. Over the next couple of years, he grows his fleet to a handful of field delivery trucks, and he’s going door to door seven days a week, starting in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. Then World War II comes. Leon and lists, and he actually ends up working for General Patton as a fuel delivery logistics expert. But he comes back from the war with all of this extra learning about fuel supply and how to move in logistics, and he says, “You know, we can do more than just deliver fuel oil.” So he starts expanding the fleet of fuel delivery, but he also builds his first refinery so that way he can have different types of fuel that he’s delivering with all of his truck fleets, and that it is, “Oh, well, if we can make all these different types of fuel, including gasoline, why am I just selling that to other people? I can sell direct to customers if I build gas stations, right?” So he’s so entrepreneurial. The entrepreneurial was spirit, right? The idea that I can do anything against American Dream, I can build it from scratch, and he does so. About nineteen sixty, the first Hess gas station is built. Now, I say that because many of your listeners may not never have heard of a Hess gas station. But what they will recognize around this time, because he was so successful with his fuel oil delivery business and then his refinery and then his gas stations, is he actually becomes wealthy enough to become a partial owner in what ultimately will become the New York Jets, the NFL football team. In nineteen sixty-three, he’s got a bunch of gas stations in New Jersey. He’s a partial owner of the Titans, which become the New York Jets, which, by the way, they’re green and white for a reason. And the history of the Hess Toy Truck actually starts at a Jets game. The story goes that Leon has his out of Jets game with a friend of his, a longtime friend that he grew up with from the neighborhood in Perth Amboy, who happened to be in the toy business. Marks Toys was a Virginia-based toy manufacturer, very popular in the fifties and sixties. They’re no longer in business today. But apparently, during conversation of the game, “Hey, Leon, have you ever thought about offering something other than guess at your gas stations? You know, we can make a really cool toy that would be really interesting.” And so then you can start seeing the wheels turn with Leon. He goes, “Well, one of the things that always stuck with him as a kid,” as he later recounted the story, “was that during the Great Depression,”—you know, he didn’t have at the holiday times. He saw didn’t have at the holiday times, so he wanted a toy. Then, “I just was, ‘Oh, I can sell this at my gas station!'” It was something special and different and unique to Hess. It was going to be of quality that nobody could match; it was going to be innovative; and above all else, besides the quality and of it, it was going to be affordable. And so in nineteen sixty-four, the Hess Toy Truck hits the market for the first time. And what is it? It’s an oil tanker. So it’s a truck with one of those long oil tankers. You would see them deliver fuel oil directly into the gas stations. And the actual toy itself was really innovative in a couple of ways. One, it had batteries included, which before that time didn’t exist. People weren’t putting batteries in the toys. So one, from an affordability standpoint, you didn’t have to go out and buy extra batteries. And two, it was really easy to give because the minute you could open it, the kids could play with it. Now it also had working lights. Very few toys back then actually had electronics. If you could think back to the early nineteen sixties, there wasn’t like a lot of electronics in any toy vehicles, very few in fact. And also, it had the ability to fill up water into the tank at a hose that could empty the water out of it, so it was really something special. Our history all says that the first retail price is a dollar twenty-nine. Now others will say, “You know, we can’t—we actually can’t find anything other than signs that’s say a dollar thirty-nine as the prayers.” “Do we know that for sure?” So there’s all speculation about where the one twenty-nine comes from. But let’s just call it a dollar thirty to make it easy. But that was the first, you know, the first Hess Toy Truck back in nineteen sixty-four. And because it was such a cool toy and it was so affordable, it sold out really fast. And so they said, “Wow, this is the great Thita!” “We should do this again next year!” So they did it again next year. “Wow! Sold out even faster!” “And we should, we should, you know, we should.” “Let’s figure out what else we can do here, and now where do we go with this thing?” And so what happened was it really created this, this—you think about the Cabbage Patch Kid type craziness in the nineteen eighties—well, Hess predated that quite a long time. Because you couldn’t go to Toys or US, or today Walmart, Target, or Amazon, or whatever. The only way that you could get the most popular toy was to stand in line at a gas station. They would go out and sale on Thanksgiving Day, and so it became this really interesting holiday tradition. You know, Mom would get up and start the turkey, and Dad would get up, you know, go to the gas station, stand in line with his coffee, and he could be out there a couple of hours waiting in line that goes wrapped around the block to get two Hess trucks, cash only. And if you wanted more, back of the line, start again. And it became this, this tradition where family started to look forward to this, and people would meet other families in line, and they would get to know these people, and every year they would make a tradition out of getting up. And sometimes when the kids were old enough, they would join in on this, and they would go out and wait with Dad as like this cool tradition. Like some people go to the Basy’s Parade. Other people were going to the host locations and just hanging out for a couple of hours. So they got of trucks, and they would sell out very fast. And so people would line up for the fear of not wanting to get to miss out. And what was really also pretty cool about it is for years and years and years it was all on Thanksgiving, but it got to the point where the police effectively needed to be involved to mitigate the traffic issues around the host stations. And so a call from the governor basically saying, “Look, look, look, Lena, please, can we do this not on a holiday, because like, we really don’t want to have all of our officers out there. It’s not fair. They want to be home.” And we said, “Yes, we can. Of course, we can accommodate that.” And so we ended up shifting the on-sale date off of the traditional Thanksgiving Day, out of understanding of the issues that we were creating with all the traffic jams and our already very busy travel holiday holiday time. But it became this spark for this frantic collectibility of these toy trucks, and because they were hard to get like anything else, that it became really value in the resale market.

And you’ve been listening to Justin Meyer, director of Brand Marketing and general manager of Hesse Toy Truck. And when we come back, more of the story of Hesse Toy Trucks here on our American stories. And we’re back with our American stories and the story of Hesse Toy Trucks, the East Coast holiday phenomenon that is now spread across the country. When we last left off, we heard how folks would line up around the block to buy a toy truck. I did that myself with my brothers, and at all places at a gas station, and there was not a Hess station in our town. We had to go to the next town to do it and walk there. Back to Justin Mayer, director of Brand Marketing and general manager of Hestoyd Truck with the rest of the story.

So early on, the goal of the Hestoy Truck was to produce a very realistic vehicle that was something that existed in the real Hass business. So the example, the first one of that oil tanker that would—and when I say oil tanker, I mean one that drives on the road. And that’s important clarification. I’ll get to that in a second. Then you would drive to the gas station, and then the fuel jumps into the big containers, you know, underground. So that was the first one, and shortly after that, we did the actual ocean freight oil carrier—right, tanker, as they call it. It was The Voyager, which was really a large vessel, an oil vessel carrier carrying boat vessel that has did own, and that was that. It was highly successful in nineteen sixty-seven. So it was like this awesome map was like eighteen inches long. It was ginormous, highly detailed, had lights, really cool. In fact, if you can get your hands on one of those today, they go for like four thousand dollars, so really, you know, a collector’s piece today. But after that, they kept on with other things that hasted, ranging from fire trucks, and people like, “Well, what, any fire trucks?” “Well, at a refinery, it’s really important to have emergency services vehicles, so we had fire trucks. We had box trucks that we would use that would have your little drum barrels of oil that would be used for transportation. So they were very popular for a number of years. Different box trucks and things of that nature all the way really up until the late nineteen eighties. And in the late nineteen eighties, they said, “You know, kids are sort of—they love these toys, they love to play with them. We should really do something that’s a little bit more fun to play with.” “You know, we know that the collectors love like, ‘Yes, it’s a Hess product,’ but this is made for kids, the kids’ toys.” “So let’s, let’s do some, some cooler things, some fun things.” And we started introducing products that really had nothing to do with the Hess traditional business of, you know, running gas stations and refineries and drilling for oil and natural gas and all of that. And so you started seeing, you know, the whole racing team. A lot of race cars came in the years after that, and then we started pushing the boundaries further, and you ended up with, “All right, well, now we’re actually giving you one toy.” “Now we’re going to give you two toys.” “So, so, here’s a truck and a race car.” And so you started seeing all of this sort of innovation and product, but again, only one toy was released a year, and so you didn’t know what it was going to be. It was top secret ’til it came out on tal. And with this ever-expanding type of vehicle, what we started seeing was that, you know, on Christmas morning, people weren’t just playing with the gift they got that year. They would go out dig up all the old ones out of their basement or take them out of the closet and use them either as holiday decoration, because they all lit up and they look beautiful under the Christmas tree or on the mantle. But then they would play with all of their collection and create this amazing imaginary play world of Hess. And because, well, now I have a fire talk, and I have a tanker, and I have a race car, and I have a helicopter, and I have a station. All of a sudden, it becomes just a world of play. And so folks think about, “Oh, well, Lego, you can play with it so many different ways,” and that’s why, you know, it’s got staying power. Well, that’s really true of the Hess truck fleet too, because there’s so many different ways to create new play scenarios with it. And as your collection grows, so does who you play with. And I think that’s an important point too, because what we found was the trucks, not only were they just fun to play with, but they became a very emotional bond between the gift recipient and the gift giver. Somebody had to care enough to wake up on Thanksgiving morning and stay in line in the freezing cold in some parts of the country, right, and make sure they got you that Hass truck before it sold out. And it became a tradition. So every year, you know, people will come up to me and say, “Oh, I used to get it as a kid,” and the next line is always, “It was my uncle who”—or my aunt, whatever. It’s not just the toy, it’s who gave me the toy. And that’s something that’s really unique. And the tradition of that continues today where people are always like, “Well, you know, my Dad Hass now, but now I carry on the tradition for my kids and their kids, and that handing off of the tradition, and it sometimes we hear fights within a family over who gets to be the one that gives the Hess Toy Trucks when the older generation has passed on.” Because it’s been almost sixty years and we see that that transition.

The Hess fandom truly is something amazing. It includes everyone from little boys from The Bronx to Olympic gold medallists.

And it’s amazing. Like every year, I hear of other people who are fans of the Hesttruck and have some relation to the Hest Truck. I don’t know, two or three years ago, we sold out really early, and all of a sudden, I get like this direct DM from Michael Phelps. I’m like, “This has to be like a joke, right?” Sure enough. Now he waited too long, and we sold out, and he’s like, “Oh, I got three boys, I’ve got my whole”—he grew up in Baltimore on that nine. If I got, I gotta