Hess Toy Trucks

Leon Hess founded his company in 1933, but the toy truck arrived much later. In 1964, just four years after opening his first gas station, Leon decided to offer families a luxury accessible to everyone: the 1964 Hess Tanker Trailer. It came with working headlights and taillights controlled by a switch on the cab, a cargo tank you could actually fill and empty, and—the signature kindness—batteries included. No scrambling on Christmas Eve to find batteries; they were already there.

Nearly every year since — the chain paused only a few times, in the oil-shock years of the 1970s and early 80s — a new truck has appeared before Christmas. The models evolved: fire trucks, helicopters, race cars, space-themed vehicles—but the rhythm stayed constant. For fifty years the ritual was tactile and local: a parent topping off the tank at a Hess station in November or December and walking out with the year's truck, a moment of small abundance built into a mundane errand. Commercials started in the late 1970s, and from 1988 onward they carried the famous jingle that made the trucks unmissable when they aired. Collectors kept them mint-in-box in closets, building private archives of the annual series—a chain that became its own kind of nostalgia the moment you opened the box.

When Hess sold its retail gas stations in 2014, the truck didn't disappear. It evolved. The company moved the tradition online, selling direct-to-consumer, and the ritual persisted—now a deliberate annual purchase instead of a station visit, but still December, still a new truck, still batteries included. The annual release has now extended past its 60th year, reaching collectors who never pumped a gallon of Hess gasoline.