.... in your pic it does look like the inside corners of the 2/3 fork are rounded a bit, indicating long term sloppy shifting, it may be that you need to get a spot of weld on those ends and file them back square ....
Bill
Bill, you are exactly right. Wear on the forks, combined with the too-big gap between the forks, allowed the pawl to drop out of the R-1 fork, hanging it up in 1st.
My friends at the VCCA found me a NOS box:
http://lymanhall.smugmug.com/Trucks/1953-Chevrolet-3100-Truck/i-3PKS4bL/0/M/DSC_1449-M.jpg I put it in yesterday, and the problem is solved. You can see how crisp the new forks look, compared to the old ones (for clarity, I took the picture before I put grease in the box; it has grease, now).
Thanks everyone for the help and advice.
