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

On this episode of Our American Stories, for nearly 60 years, Hess trucks have brought smiles to children, and adults, up and down the East Coast. They were also the kind of gift the energy entrepreneur who created them wished he could have gotten growing up. Hess Toy Truck Director, Justin Mayer, and superfan, Mike Roberto, tell the story. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:11):
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.

Speaker 2 (00:36):
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,

(00:58):
to tell us more.

Speaker 3 (01:00):
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,

(01:21):
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

(01:41):
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 a oil delivery business. He buys a nineteen

(02:02):
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

(02:23):
start in nineteen thirty three of hes 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

(02:45):
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

(03:07):
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

(03:27):
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 and what ultimately

(03:49):
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 hes toy truck actually starts at a Jet game.

(04:14):
The story goes that Leon has his out of Jets
game with a friend of his longtime friend that he
grew up with from the neighborhood in Perth and boy
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

(04:34):
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

(04:55):
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 hass. 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.

(05:17):
And so in nineteen sixty four, the HES 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.

(05:38):
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 had the ability to fill

(06:01):
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 dollar thirty to make it easy. But

(06:22):
that was the first, you know, the first hes 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.

(06:44):
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 has 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

(07:07):
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

(07:29):
get two hes 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

(07:50):
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 and for
the fear of not wanting to get to miss out.
And what was really also pretty cool about it is

(08:11):
for years and years and years it was all in 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

(08:32):
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 are already very busy travel holiday holiday time. But
it became this spark for this frantic collectibility of these

(08:54):
toy trucks, and because they were hard to get like
anything else, that it became really value in the resale market.

Speaker 1 (09:04):
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 hes Toy
Trucks here on our American stories. And we're back with

(09:40):
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

(10:02):
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.

Speaker 3 (10:17):
So early on the goal of the Hestoy Truck was
to produce a very realistic vehicle that was something that
existed in the real Hasse 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

(10:39):
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.

(11:00):
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

(11:22):
kept on with other things that hasted, ranging from fire
trucks and people like, well, what any fire trucks. Well,
at 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

(11:43):
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

(12:04):
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

(12:26):
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 till it came out. On tal and with this
ever expanding type of vehicle. What we started seeing was that,

(12:50):
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

(13:13):
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

(13:36):
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

(13:57):
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 hash 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.

(14:19):
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 has toy trucks when the older generation

(14:40):
has passed on. Because it's been almost sixty years and
we see that that transition.

Speaker 2 (14:45):
It's one thing to talk about customer loyalty and the
impact Test trucks have had on generations. But it's another
thing to hear from those people themselves. Here's Mike Roberto,
author of the Hess Truck Encyclopedia.

Speaker 4 (15:00):
Here's how my story starts. It's nineteen seventy seven. I'm
five years old. I believe it was like a Wednesday night.
It was a school night. I remember that I was
going to probably kindergarten at the time, right, And my
dad didn't get home till about five thirty six o'clock.
And I remember my mom telling me something about wait
until like your dad gets home, but in the good way,

(15:21):
not the oh, wait until your dad gets home, you know.
And I remember it was cold and dark, and we
lived in the Bronx at the time in New York.
I remember my dad let me sit in the front seat, okay,
which was, you know, a big thing for a little kid.
And I remember and he and he took me to
he took me to the hest station to get a

(15:43):
toy truck, right. And what was interesting is we had
a family mechanic. His name was Rocco, and I remember,
you know, whenever we brought the cars to him, because
my mom had a car and my dad had a car.
And I remember everything there was all dirty and greasy
and grimy. You know, it's it's a mechanics garage, right,
And when we got to the station, you know, everything

(16:06):
was just lit up so white and clean and pretty.
And I remember looking at asking my dad, you know,
how how could they be so all like white and clean?
I mean, to me, it looked like I was in heaven, right,
And my dad had explained to me that he well,
he said that, you know, they don't fix cars here,

(16:27):
they just sell gas. So that's how it can, you know,
be all white and clean. And I remember, as a
five year old it blew my mind. I understood the reference,
like it made sense to me, you know, and I
felt I felt like a big kid for that, you know.
And I remember being I remember that moment more than
getting the physical truck at the station. But I do

(16:48):
remember we went inside and there was a guy with
a metal desk, and you know, they had the trucks
inside what they call the fish bowl or the fish tank.
So and I remember playing with a toy of course,
and so not too long after that, uh, it's my

(17:08):
dad had he became terminal. He had a form of
muscular dystrophe. Anyway, that memory went on to become only
one of three positive memories that I have of my
dad before he became sick. And you know, years later,

(17:35):
not too long after his passing, I remember driving in
Long Island because at this point we lived in Queens
and naturally there wasn't many hestations around where we lived.
But every time I drove past a hestation, you know,
going to Long Island, I always thought of my dad,
you know, and I was like, oh, you know, it
was it was that positive neural association.

Speaker 2 (18:03):
The Hess fandom truly is something amazing. It includes everyone
from little boys from the Bronx to Olympic gold medallists.

Speaker 3 (18:11):
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.

(18:33):
If I got I gotta get these things. What do
I do? I'm like, may we sold out? Yeaha bye
bye fast. But it's funny we hear those kinds of
stories that we get reached out by people all the
time that have a Sean connection to that, a lot
of celebrities, and so it's just great. It's a great
tradition that lives on and so many people are part
of it that you don't even realize it. But it

(18:54):
really touches my heart every year when I get you know,
every day I wake up to a new set of
emails or videos. I gave it for Honikah last night,
and so it's like I get all these oh look,
here's the video of my kid opening it, and they
all just love it. And it's really it's heartwarming, it's
heart working.

Speaker 1 (19:13):
And a special thanks to Robbie on the production of
that piece. What a delight, And a special thanks to
Justin Mayer from Hess Toy Truck. And also a special
thanks to Mike Roberto Fandom defined right there, folks, The
Hess Truck Encyclopedia is his contribution to this world that
I know in so many East Coast people grew up

(19:35):
with what I did not know is the story of
Leon Hess and his father. A Lithuanian Jew comes to
this country, starts a cold delivery company, goes into bankruptcy.
His son takes up the mantle, turns it into a
oil delivery company, a mini empire. By the way, he
learned a lot of what he needed to learn from
General Patton. What a beautiful and big and bold story

(19:56):
about a man his dream and how his family kept
it going. The story of the hes Toy Truck. Here
on our American stories