A 1935 seed grew into the SUV

The SUV was born in 1935. That's the year Chevrolet introduced the Suburban Carryall, a windowed steel body atop a half-ton commercial truck chassis. Base price: $675, not including extras such as a heater and rear bumper.

It was an inauspicious debut for the SUV, which has become one of the industry's most popular types of passenger vehicles.

That first model had three-row bench seating for eight and windows all around, all powered by a 60-hp "stove bolt six" engine. Like its pickup base, the 1935 Suburban Carryall had only two side doors.

It was far from a modern SUV, says Dave Cole, chairman emeritus of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich.

"It was a truck -- utility without any sport, something to haul the miners to the mine," he says. "But it paved the way for SUVs. It was a stage in the evolution."

Chevrolet had to add the "Carryall" to distinguish its Suburban from other so-called suburbans offered by Dodge, Nash and Plymouth.

The early 1930s were bursting with innovative body styles. Car-based "sedan deliveries" hauled light packages but had no back seat. Truck-based "depot hacks" carried people and baggage but were open to the weather. Enclosed people haulers had only two rows of seats.

Chevrolet experimented and in 1933 and 1934 even built three-row, wood-frame-and-canvas people movers commissioned by the U.S. National Guard and Civilian Conservation Corps.

For the 1935 Suburban Carryall, Chevrolet re- placed the damage-prone metal-over-wood side frame construction with an all-steel body. Chevy also made the rear two rows of seats removable.

Nothing else like it

That all-metal body gave Chevrolet an edge, says Stephen Kassis, owner of the Filling Station in Lebanon, Ore., a vintage car restorer and auto parts retailer.

"It was really the first attempt to make a station wagon," he says. "Nobody else had anything like it."

Seventy-six years later, the General Motors Heritage Center calls the Chevrolet Suburban "the oldest continually produced vehicle in automotive history."

Apparently the first four decades were the toughest.

"You didn't see Suburbans except as commercial vehicles" in the 1940s and 1950s, says Monte Hollertz, owner of Chevyland USA Auto Museum in Elm Creek, Neb. "Farmers all used cars for their family because trucks used more gas. Around here, Suburbans were used as covered delivery wagons."

Decades before Texas magazine famously dubbed it "the national car of Texas," the Suburban sold slowly in the Lone Star state, too.

"They took awhile to catch on," says David Orr, 76, now semiretired as owner of Orr Chevrolet in Texarkana, Texas. As a child doing odd jobs at the family dealership in the late 1940s, he remembers father Guss resisting factory pressure to stock Suburbans.

When David Orr took over, he did, too. "Every year the district manager came by pushing Suburbans, and every year we had to take one," he says. In the late 1950s, Orr took a 1951 dark green Suburban in trade but couldn't sell it. "I ended up using it myself for several years to haul our kids around."

Banana spiders

Alex Mair, 90, who retired in 1986 as engineering head of the General Motors Technical Center, learned to drive at 14 delivering groceries in a new 1935 Suburban.

"Driving it was easy," he says. But when Mair picked up bananas at the depot, he'd worry about sharing his ride with the banana spiders the grocer had warned him about.

Even General Motors isn't sure of early Chevy Suburban sales. GM saw the Suburban more as a pickup extension than a nameplate, Cole says. "It was more about selling more trucks and engines without adding much cost."

The Suburban didn't eliminate running boards or add a V-8 until 1955. It was cheaper to use the pickup setup rather than engineer more doors. So the eight-passenger Suburban kept the two-door layout until Chevrolet added a third, right-side door in 1967. And a grown-up Mair, by then head of truck engineering at Chevrolet, happily helped design the additional door.

"There was demand for it," he says with a shrug, perhaps recalling having to reach baskets of groceries only through the rear doors in the first Suburban.

The first four-door Suburban didn't come until 1973, 38 years and seven generations of pickup redesign after the first model.

That year, Chevrolet also improved interior comfort to make the Suburban more personal: better seats, fully trimmed door panels, wood-grain dashboard trim and "simulated buffalo-hide vinyl upholstery."

Dealer Orr sees the four doors as the turning point in Texas.

Cole sees two events creating a chance for the Suburban and other truck-based SUVs patterned after it: the establishment of a lower U.S. corporate average fuel economy standard for cars than trucks in the 1970s and the collapse in oil prices in the 1980s.

And in the 1980s, Chevy Suburban sales took off. From 28,004 units in 1982, Suburban sales jumped to 65,428 by 1989 and passed the 100,000 mark in 1998. Sales peaked at 154,782 in 2001.

The Chevrolet Suburban didn't start out as an SUV, but it evolved from its humble beginnings. And when in the 1980s the market was ready to combine utility with sport in a truck-based personal vehicle, the Suburban was ready.

GM didn't have to invent the SUV because the Suburban existed, Mair says. "It was already there," he says. "It was the prototype."