Milk van's fourth fife is delivering smiles throughout Utah

Just seeing a milk truck could trigger nostalgia for the days of home delivery, though some areas of Utah and Idaho still offer home delivery. The Stowell's milk van carries as many memories as it did milk.

Bartley Stowell bought the 1962 Ford Falcon van for his family. The Falcon name was on some Ford vans of the time, "Econoline" on others, depending on their build. All were built on the Falcon car platform, which put the engine up front between the seats and gave them bigger cargo areas.

The family used the van until the end of the 1960s, when Bartley Stowell fitted it for milk delivery. He pulled the seats out and installed plywood. When his son, Todd Stowell, got his license at age 14, Bartley Stowell assigned the van to him to deliver milk every morning to Stowell Dairy's customers. The family ran a dairy and a predecessor to today's convenience stores.

Young Todd Stowell would get going at 5 a.m., load up, complete his milk route and get to school by 8:45 a.m. He said he didn't have time for breakfast, so he ate on the road. His mother, Nedine Stowell, would let him take Hostess cupcakes and chocolate milk from the store. When school let out, he had to drive to the bottling plant and load up enough milk for the next day's run because there was not time to make the pickup and the deliveries in the morning.

With 72 stops every day, the three-on-the-tree shift linkage wore out several times. Tired of replacing it with junkyard shifters, Bartley Stowell devised a two-stick shifter using rebar and doorknobs. It has held up better than what Ford devised in 1962.

Todd Stowell and the Falcon van worked together until 1977 when he left to serve a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They resumed their working relationship when he returned in 1979, and ended it in 1982 when, now married, he retired from the family business.

Bartley Stowell retired the van at that time, parking it behind the family's warehouse, where it sat from 1982 to 2000.

At that point, Todd Stowell and his son, Kristopher Stowell, dug it out. Kristopher Stowell was in high school, and he and his buddies got it running, installed a disco ball and bean bag chairs and had fun with it, according to Todd. He graduated in 2000, and the van went back to sitting on the side of the warehouse when those boys married and moved away.

In 2020, the family sold the warehouse and had to clean it out. While digging the van out again, this time to take it to a junkyard, Todd Stowell's kids said, "Let's see if it will start." They put in some gas and it fired up, changing its destiny. They drove it into town and took it to restorer Scott Anderson.

Todd and Scott Stowell worked on the project a couple of days a week.

Todd Stowell said that when they sandblasted the paint, half of the van was gone to rust. They had to rebuild the floorboards and found two donor vans to supply replacements for other decaying panels. He said Anderson told him that if the van were not his dad's, he would've talked him into another van. Anderson painted the van its original colors.

The pre-milk truck interior was brown, like so many car interiors of the time, and Aaron Hill did the upholstery. Hill used the original seats, which had been stored in the warehouse basement. They were in good shape, but brown. They are now a cheery blue and white.

The van and many Falcon cars of the time came with a 144 cubic-inch straight-six that produced about 90 horsepower, which is quite good for a motorcycle, not so much for a mobile family room. A buddy suggested the family fit in a V-8, though Ford didn't offer one back then.

Todd Stowell bought a 302, not knowing it was souped up with a cam and other performance parts. He had to engineer and innovate to get fuel lines to it, combine pulleys and relocate the compressor to add air conditioning and solve its overheating problem (the engine is basically squeezed into an isolated ice chest) with a 1932 Ford aluminum radiator.

He updated his dad Bartley's twin-shifters, using milk bottles painted inside. The chocolate milk bottle gives first and reverse gears, and the white milk is for second and third.

Stowell takes the milk wagon to shows, and it's the mascot vehicle for the Hot Classic Nights car show in Rigby, Idaho. He said it will make an appearance at Brigham City's Peach Days car show this year.

Van fans at last year's Peach Days car show were enamored with the vehicle, and a photographer waited for people to clear out to get a solo image, but people were impressed even before they knew the full story, as you do now.

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