Tim,
Regarding your question about the missing pages in the '54 resto pack--yes, and yes. Both pages are missing in my copy, too. There's one page in the '53 pack that is smudged beyond legibility.
I bought reprints of the Chevrolet Service News for years '52 and '53. The January, '52 issue has the '52 car and truck features. The January '53 issue gives the '53 car and truck features. The November, '53 issue, as you know, gives the '54 truck features. If you would like to have a copy of page 3, I could oblige.
I could find no reference to De Luxe or Deluxe anything, cab or equipment, in the '53 resto pack. As has been mentioned, GM forwent the fancy stuff due to shortages in '52 and '53. The '54 pack only mentions the deluxe equipment options. I don't see a deluxe cab reference, though there is a separate chrome equipment option (bumper, grill, hubcaps). Also in '54, one must know when the truck was built to know which deluxe equipment option applies. Early '54 only had the RPO 390. This one was changed and the other two were added mid-year. They are also model specific. The term "deluxe equipment" was used for RPO 390 in '49 too, according to the '49 resto pack (which is available for online perusal at chevy.tocmp.com), and, to get back to the wheel topic, body-color wheels came with that option in '49, with the same striping as for '53. If anybody reading this has a '51 or '52 resto pack, I'd be interested to know what they say about wheel colors.
Back to the black wheels. If stripes were used on them in '53, what would the stripe color have been? Would they have stuck to the body striping colors as for the body-colored wheels? If so, one of the stripe colors was Jet Black for 4 of the body colors, and I don't think that would show up too well on a black wheel. Could the striping info in the '53 pack have been erroneously carried over from previous years?
The guy I bought my '53 from, who supposedly had done lots of research on these trucks, claimed that Chevy lost their records for the '53 model year. Of course, this guy claimed lots of other things about his/my truck and '53s in general that turned out to be bo-oh-ohh-gus.
