A one-owner 1956 GMC 100 pickup is a rare beast because very few of these trucks are still around in 2024.
The list gets shorter when the truck is a survivor with only 32,800 original miles on its odometer and still in magnificent shape.
Jim Sutherland
We at MyStarCollectorCar have seen very few 68-year-old vehicles that look like they just left the factory, but Darryl Wasylyshyn’s 1956 GMC is one of those vehicles that defied the odds and survived the decades with minimal wear and tear on it.
Darryl is a car guy who grew up in the hobby and learned how to wrench on vehicles at an early age. He never lost his enthusiasm for vehicles and eventually built his legacy in the car hobby, including the 1956 GMC that he has owned for about nine years.
Darryl is only the second owner of the truck because it stayed with its original owner and his family for almost 60 years before he discovered the GMC. The original owner was a farmer in California who purchased the pickup for his business and held onto it when he moved to Washington state.
The first owner had daughters, including one named Jane who learned how to drive in the ’56 GMC and bent a piston rod in its engine when she over-revved it, according to Darryl. The factory engine (a 316 Pontiac V-8) was subsequently sent out for a rebuild, but unfortunately the mechanical shop burnt to the ground and the truck’s motor was grabbed by a salvage company.
The truck went into a long hibernation with the first owner and his family but, by a strange coincidence, Darryl pulled into the family’s yard when he had a flat tire on his motorhome. The truck was still hidden in a storage shed, so Darryl was unaware of its existence at the time, but he was very close that fateful day.
However, fate was on Darryl’s side when he spotted an ad for the truck after the original owner passed away and his daughters wanted to sell it. Darryl purchased the truck, named it “Jane” in honor of the first owner’s daughter, and began a period-correct engine hunt for the GMC.
A 316 cubic-inch Pontiac engine built in 1956 was Darryl’s main goal because he wanted to maintain the GMC’s originality as much as possible. Amazingly, Darryl found an engine in Wyoming that fit the bill more than he could even imagine because it was the original engine from his ’56 GMC and somehow found its way from the salvage company in Washington to a seller in Wyoming.
Darryl was astonished because his survivor truck with only 30,000 miles on its odometer was reunited with its factory engine after so many years apart. The stars were perfectly aligned for Darryl because this kind of luck is off the charts for car guys.
The net result is Darryl owns a true survivor truck that owes its originality to his good fortune during the engine hunt. He had more good luck because the GMC left the factory with a complicated 4-speed automatic transmission, but Darryl was able to rejuvenate the original tranny via a builder who had the right skills and factory parts for the job.
Darryl’s GMC story had a car guy happy ending with many twists and turns along the way–just the kind of plot we like here at MyStarCollectorCar.
Jim Sutherland
BY: Jim Sutherland
Jim Sutherland is a veteran automotive writer whose work has been published by many major print and online publications. The list includes Calgary Herald, The Truth About Cars, Red Deer Advocate, RPM Magazine, Edmonton Journal, Montreal Gazette, Windsor Star, Vancouver Province, and Post Media Wheels Section.
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