*hands on hips* Are you putting Babe down?!? She's as much a pickup as any half-ton of the Seventies, and more comfy, to boot!
A real truck is a truck, not how long the bed is, or how high you can jack it up off the ground. Think about all the hardworking trucks with ultrashort wheelbases that were built for utility work, like Ma Bell, or ones with workboxes for HD work but cannot carry a load, not to mention vans, which carry passengers or cargo, and keep both dry.
Back then, they did. There wasn't that much theft at the time; only when it all started to be a real problem did they change how they shipped all cars.