Great Depression grounded Eagle trucks

0 0 August 08, 2025 Edit this post

by Bill Buys

BACK in 1919, an Eagle Model 105 three-ton garage service truck was a common sight on the roads in and around St Louis, Missouri.

It was owned by Joseph Reis, proprietor of the Reis Auto Repair Company, which and was one of the first to offer a 24-hour towing service.

The truck’s crane had an 11-ton lifting capacity and the company motto was “We go anywhere, for any service, at any time”.

The Reis Auto Repair Co. was also the official garage of the Automobile Club of Missouri.

“Built in St. Louis,” the early 20th Century ads emphasised, and Joseph Reis was big on the stance that things made in America were better than anything from other countries.

Yes, apart from his repair business, he was also the man behind the ‘Made in America’ heavy duty Eagle trucks.

The products were so good that, in a twist of irony, it seems more were snapped up by overseas markets than were sold in America.

Jospeh Reis was born in 1883, and was a lifetime resident of St. Louis.

In his youth, he studied to be a mechanic.

In 1914, at age 31, he established the Reis Auto Repair Company, which was noteworthy for having the largest tyre press in St Louis, as well as major affiliations with Lyon Batteries, US Tire and the Ford Motor Co.

With his burgeoning repair business, in an interview with Who’s Who in St. Louis, he laid the foundation for expanding his business to include manufacturing trucks.

“The truck industry has a very sound future because it is based on one of the basic requirements of civilisation -- transportation,” he said.

“Without transportation we would have no large cities, and without large cities civilisation would be many centuries behind what it is today.”

Based on his belief in the growing demand for trucks, in 1919 he launched his Eagle line of heavy-duty trucks, making him president of both the Reis Automobile Co. (re-branded from Reis Auto Repair Co.) and the Eagle Motor Truck Corp.

By 1925, his truck assembly plant covered 21,000 sq ft and production was six trucks a day.

Reis was an astute businessman and strived to stay ahead of his competitors.

The Eagle Motor Truck Corp. maintained an in-house export department while other domestic truck makers relied on exporting agencies to conduct foreign business.

He hired a bright chap in G B Bell, who was fluent in several languages, to run the Eagle export department and he also implemented a state-of-the-art photographic division to show the various models of Eagle trucks to both domestic and foreign buyers.

Catering to foreign markets was important to the growth and continued success of Eagle Motor Truck Corp.

The sturdy trucks were being shipped worldwide, including to buyers in Bolivia, Brazil, Cuba, Ecuador, Greece, Honduras, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, South Africa and Spain.

Many of these foreign-bought trucks saw hard-core use in either mountainous or jungle terrain.

Oddly, there’s no mention of any ever being sent to Australia.

By 1928, the Eagle truck models ranged from one- to five-ton capacity.

In the export department Michael Castro took over from G B Bell and he closed a deal with Cuba (long before Fidel Castro’s day) for Eagle Motor Truck to supply 100 trucks annually in both 1929 and 1930.

Business was so good that Reis and his fellow corporate officers realised their 21,000 sq ft plant was too small to handle the needed increase in production, so a new, larger assembly plant was planned to be ready for the production of the 1929 model trucks.

However, as was the case for many other vehicle manufacturers of the time, The Great Depression arrived and the financial meltdown almost immediately stopped the impressive soaring of the Eagle (its bonnet emblem was a big eagle with wings outstretched) and caused the demise of Joseph’s impressive company and hundreds of others.

The new, bigger plant never happened.

As for Joseph P Reis, he remained heavily invested in the St. Louis community in various capacities.

He served as a vice-president of a local bank, was a member of both the Masonic Order and Kiwanis Club and was a patron of both the St Louis opera house and film industry.

In his obituary published when he died in 1971 at age 88, it was reported that he continued working fulltime until his passing.