SPONSORED BY GULLWING MOTOR CARS
The story starts as it ends—with this 1964 Datsun NL320 pickup, a truck that even hardcore Japanese-car enthusiasts have a hard time picturing, and a fat stack of receipts from the no-longer-extant Bookout Datsun/Nissan of Visalia, California. Current owner Moses Thompson of Tucson, Arizona, explains, “I’m sitting on 20 pages of receipts for everything under the sun—steering wheel, door felts, visors, lenses—and they all say ‘Ralph’ on them.”
Ralph is Ralph Bookout, son of the founders of the eponymous California Datsun dealership. And while the first 16 years of this NL320’s life have been lost to time, we can pick up this truck’s story in late 1980, when it was effectively restored for the first time. “The parts he ordered probably haven’t been available since 1980,” Moses muses. “He might even have cleaned out the dealer’s NOS hoard.”
Few recall that Nissan tried to sell two similar-but-different pickups in the first half of the ’60s. They shared a face—one that was also shared with the humble Bluebird sedan at the time—as well as that sedan’s
