Oh the good old days! I've worked on a lot of 40, 50,60,70s cars and trucks with drum brakes. Early days with 4 wheel drum brakes, 70s up most with front disc rear drums. Back in the day we would take the hub nut and washer off and remove the outer bearing, put the nut back on and pull the hub catching the rear inner bearing and it would pull the bearing out along with the rear seal. Repack the bearings and reuse the rear seal. Some of those rear hub drum seals were actually made out of real leather. You know, I don't recall ever replacing a wheel bearing in those old cars and trucks if wheel bearing maintenance was done on schedule. Of course back in the day oil changes and lube jobs, along with ignition points and tune ups were about every 3000 miles. Heck we didn't always use a 0.25 - 0.30 feeler gauge to adjust the ignition points, a foldover match book cover was about the same. We thought we were high tech if we had a dwell meter and the trapdoor on the distributor cap to adjust the ignition points with the engine running. That was a long time ago!
These days, obviously I don't do wheel bearings that way. When you remove the rear bearing to repack it, you have to remove the rear seal and you will damage it. A claw hammer works well removing the hub drum rear seal. hub/drum rear seals are cheap, replace them, good double lip seals keep the grease from getting past and contamination the brakes. I always carry new spare seals.
