For all of the 1970s and well into the 1980s, most mail in the United States was delivered via simple steel boxes with rear-wheel drive, automatic transmissions, sliding doors, steering wheels on the same side of the street as mailboxes and big mail-sorting trays on the other side. This was the DJ-5 Dispatcher aka "Postal Jeep," and I've found one of these iconic little trucks in a car graveyard in America's least populous state.
I came of driving age in the early 1980s, when running ex-USPS Dispatchers were available for hilariously cheap prices, and several of my acquaintances used them as daily drivers at that time. This is about as uncomplicated a four-wheeled, highway-legal motor vehicle as was sold in this country during the last quarter of the 20th century, with a noisy, tooth-loosening ride and a body shaped like a nearly perfect cube. A profoundly lovable machine, the mail-grade DJ-5, but it made the air-cooled Beetle seem sophisticated and luxurious.
The DJ-5 was based on a flimsier version of the CJ-5 chassis, and most examples built starting in 1968 were sold directly to the United States Postal Service. It was built by Kaiser Jeep at first, then by American Motors (via its AM General subsidiary) after that company bought Jeep in 1970. The USPS-era DJ-5 started out as the DJ-5A and then went through a series of subsequent versions that ended with the DJ-5M; this one is a DJ-5B, built from 1970 through 1972.
As recently as a decade ago, I'd see so many discarded Postal Jeeps in the boneyards that I only documented about one in three that I ran across during my junkyard travels. Then a cultural shift must have occurred that made the handful of survivors worth enough to evade this sort of fate.
The pre-USPS DJ-5 was powered by either an F-Head Hurricane or Buick V6 engine, but the DJ-5A through DJ-5M postal models came with a bewildering variety of powerplants over the years. The Kaiser Jeep-built DJ-5A had the Chevy 153 four-cylinder out of the Nova bolted to a two-speed Powerglide automatic transmission.
When AMC took over production, its straight-six engines and various three-speed automatics went into the DJ-5B (1970) through DJ-5F (1978) models (with the exception of the "Electruck" lead-acid-battery EV version of the middle 1970s). Starting with the 1979 DJ-5G, AM General used 2.0-liter Audi engines (which were also going into AMC Gremlins and Concords, not to mention Porsche 924s). At the very end, the DJ-5L had Iron Duke power and the DJ-5M received the AMC 2.5-liter four-banger.
This one is the 232-cubic-inch (3.8-liter) AMC six, rated at 145 hp and 185 lb-ft. That's impressive power for a truck that weighs just a bit over 2200 pounds. Power dropped with the 232s of the Malaise Era, and the 258-cube (4.2-liter) version became available late in the 1970s.
All the USPS DJ-5s had automatic transmissions, because most Americans couldn't drive manuals even back in the 1970s (plus it's hard to creep along a road shoulder while stuffing mail into boxes and operating a manual transmission). This one would have used the Borg-Warner 35 three-speed slushbox, which also went into Volvo 140s and 240s.
After this Dispatcher's years of delivering mail in red-white-and-blue US Mail livery came to an end, it got a coat of mozzarella-colored paint and became a delivery vehicle for a Big Cheese Pizza franchise (and now I'm wondering if the cheese-painted '72 Ford Econoline van I saw in a Denver yard last winter also worked for The Big Cheese).
The Big Cheese Pizza was founded in Wichita in 1977 and then got franchised across the region during the 1980s. Wyoming is close enough to Kansas that The Big Cheese may have had an operation in Cheyenne, or perhaps this DJ was a Deliverator in Kearney, Nebraska, or even Dodge City.
Most Big Cheese Pizza franchises were taken over by Godfather's Pizza in the late 1980s, though a few restaurants in Kansas and New Mexico continue using the old name and logo.
This one is rough but not terribly rusty, and it sits in the vintage section at Cheyenne Auto and Metal (where vehicles don't go to the crusher after a few months in the U-Pull-It inventory). Will someone rescue it and put it back on the road? We hope so.
1972 Jeep DJ-5B Dispatcher Mail Truck in Wyoming Junkyard
