A Trucker's Tale

by Ed Miller

  The trick when using the hill method to start a truck was to build up enough air pressure for the air brakes to function. It was crucial that the brakes worked properly because of the fairly busy country road at the end of Obie’s driveway. “Scared shitless” is the best way to describe the feeling of coming most of the way down the driveway with no brakes. Fortunately, we had also scared most of the country road drivers shitless over the years, so they knew to be very alert when they saw a tractor bobtailing—driving without a trailer attached, which means it has very little traction—down Obie’s driveway, especially during the winter months. This was a small town where everyone knew one another, and most of the time, drivers, both men and women, would congratulate you with a thumbs-up if the truck successfully started.

  If the truck did not start on the first attempt, we would give it another good shot of ether, push in the clutch, and roll the tractor out of the driveway onto the paved secondary road, which had enough of a downhill slope to gain momentum and crank the truck.

  Modern truck parking and braking systems make it impossible to crank a tractor by rolling it down an incline, but this tactic is unnecessary because present-day engines start easily in even the harshest, coldest weather. We older drivers have graphic memories of being greeted by the sound of our truck engines barely turning over when we needed them to start. If we had to stop, knowing our truck was not likely to start up again because of the weather, we always tried to park on a downslope, but driving through flat country usually made this impossible. If your truck wouldn’t start, you had to either ask another driver to pull your rig with a chain or call a mechanic for service. I don’t remember too many drivers pitching fits or raising hell when this occurred. It was just how things were back then. Eventually you started your truck and you went on about your business.

  Today’s trucks are greatly advanced compared with those of days gone by, because they’re equipped with air dryers as a component of their air braking systems. Most commercial vehicles are equipped with air brakes, and rubber hoses, known as “airlines,” carry compressed air from a tractor’s air compressor to all brake assemblies on both the tractor and attached trailer. In freezing weather, it’s necessary to release built-up water and condensation, which would otherwise freeze airlines, making brakes become inoperable. If you’ve ever been at a stoplight beside a tractor trailer, or even a school bus, and heard a loud expulsion of air, then the air dryer was blowing out built-up water and condensation. But before the advent of this technology, truck drivers and mechanics had to open the petcock (drainage valve) of each air tank, which were positioned on the bottom of the tanks, in order to purge the water and oil mixture that accumulated in each tank because of the weather. Some petcocks had wires or cables attached to open them, and this made it much easier to drain the tanks than it was when you had to squat under each tank and twist each petcock open with your hands. You also had to try to keep your feet as far away from the air tanks as you could, because the liquid was so nasty that it ruined most everything it sprayed.

  If drivers forgot to drain their tanks several times each day in freezing weather—or if they were simply too lazy to do so—the slimy, gray mixture would work its way throughout both the tractor and the trailer’s airlines. Depending on how badly the trailer brakes were frozen because of this, there were various tools employed to thaw them, such as blowtorches, hot water, and kerosene heater fans. If a driver was resourceful, as most were, he would use an emergency flare, three of which are part of each truck’s roadside safety equipment. These red flares, the kind you notice at an accident scene, can burn from ten to fifteen minutes and reach temperatures of up to twenty-nine hundred degrees Fahrenheit. You could also get your brakes to release by pouring isopropyl, or denatured alcohol, into the tractor airlines. After hooking the airlines to the trailer, and then charging them with air, the alcohol would work its way back through the trailer airlines, usually reaching and defrosting the brakes.

  Of course, some drivers were unable to fix their brakes themselves and had to call a road service company. For them, fixing frozen brakes brought in good money during the winter. They were often summoned to thaw brakes that had frozen while the drivers slept in rest areas and truck stops.

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  Over the years, Obie employed many truck drivers. During the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, I asked him why he was sending the drivers out on their runs on Sunday, when it looked to me like we would all be blown up by an atomic bomb. He told me that he wasn’t going to bury his head in the goddamn ground because of what other people were doing. He said he couldn’t alter the outcome of the situation, so the trucks were going on their runs as planned. It was a life lesson: Be your own man and make your own decisions.

  For good or bad, Obie’s drivers, like most truck drivers today, also lived according to their own compass. Many truckers, especially owner-operators, (O/Os)—drivers who are not employees, but contractors responsible for their own road expenses—are independent and free spirited, living like they’re the last American cowboys. When you drive a truck, you spend a great deal of time being your own boss. When away for any length of time, whether a few days or a month, drivers make most of their own decisions, and as long as they perform their jobs satisfactorily, no one gets in their face. But this preference for individuality also has a way of making drivers into floaters. Driver turnover rates were high back in the 1950s and 1960s, and they still are today. I remember Obie running through quite a few truck drivers. Most of them quit after a few months if Obie hadn’t already fired them. I wasn’t old enough to think much about the fact that they moved on so quickly, or why, I just enjoyed meeting all the drivers who came and went. Many of them made lasting impressions on me, and I learned a hell of a lot about trucking from these fellows.

  Some of Obie’s drivers left keys to their personal vehicles while they were on a trip, in the event their car needed to be moved. When my brothers, Earl and Yates, were teenagers, they would keep the batteries charged in some of the drivers’ cars by driving them all over the county. Several of the cars were what would now be called “muscle cars,” or powerful, high-performance vehicles, and, evidently, my brothers flexed them pretty hard. I was either in college or Vietnam when they were driving these cars, but hearing them tell their escapades made me long to join them. I remember Earl telling me that he drove most of the drivers’ cars, including a 1964 Ford Galaxie 500 Fastback 390 V8 and that same driver’s 1956 Chevrolet pickup truck, which had a very large engine. He said it would burn the back tires in first and second gear. He also drove a 1956 station wagon full of tools that would fly all over the place as he sped around curves.

  It seems that some of the drivers told my brothers that they knew their cars were being driven, and not just around the block, because when they returned the owners would find that their cars had considerably less gas than they did when they’d parked them. Well, some of these truckers must have been just as adventurous when they were kids, because they told my brothers to just take care of the vehicles with a knowing wink.

  One of Obie’s truck drivers was a man I’ll call Clete. He was a tall, lanky, handsome fellow who always smiled, and word had it that all the truck stop waitresses loved him. Clete always got to work on time, and he usually arrived at Obie’s early enough to wash his tractor before he left on his trip, that is, if we boys had not had time to wash it. (Earl and Yates usually washed Clete’s tractor as a thank-you to him for being one of the guys who probably knew they were driving his personal car—in Clete’s case, a fast Ford—while he was out of town, but didn’t object.)

  As a kid, I spent most summer nights at my grandparents’ house, and I was awoken one morning around four o’clock by a loud engine roar, indicative of a diesel motor with no muffler, which kept getting louder and louder. I looked out the open window and saw Clete’s dark green Mack H67 truck turning into Obie’s driveway. Obie was also roused by the noise, and he soon learned that
Clete had found a “torch man” at some truck stop, a guy who specialized in giving vehicles this type of sound effect. The fellow had cut the top off the truck’s muffler, removed its baffles, the sound muffling chambers inside a muffler, and then braised the top back into place. The gutted muffler on the Mack was very, very loud, and those were the days when having the loudest truck really meant something. The loudest truck turned everyone’s heads, and a driver was awfully proud when his truck turned heads at truck stops.

  Clete grinned like a Cheshire cat when Obie agreed the truck “sounded like a truck ought to sound,” but the grin faded fast when Obie told him the muffler would have to be replaced. Obie considered it too unprofessional. To our amazement—especially Clete’s—Obie did not take the new muffler cost out of Clete’s pay, but he did warn Clete not to gut any more mufflers.

  Another reason I remember Clete was because he once returned from a trip with the front of his trailer roof peeled back several feet. His story, which he stuck to, was that a highway had been repaved and the extra pavement raised the trailer so high that it bounced up and the corner of it hit a bridge. Clete was not the only driver who destroyed the top of his trailer, especially since we had many weekly deliveries in downtown Chicago, but none of the other drivers ever thought up an excuse better than his. The overwhelming majority of trailer roofs were damaged when drivers tried to drive under low overpasses. (The City of Chicago had many low overpasses, mostly due to its elevated train system.) When I received my chauffeur’s license at eighteen, the damaged roofs provided me with ample driving time because the trailer repair shop was about eighty miles away.

  Another driver, Harley, was a beanpole-skinny country fellow with a high-pitched voice. He was a decent driver during warm weather, but feared driving in the snow. If he knew it was going to snow during a trip, he would call in sick rather than take a chance getting stuck driving in it. On a trip from western North Carolina to Illinois, he hit snow flurries when he reached Cincinnati. He spent the night at a Cincinnati truck stop, hoping to find clear roads the next morning, but instead found several inches of snow, so he hopped on a Greyhound bus and went home to North Carolina. Obie had to send another driver to get the rig and make the delivery in Illinois. Later, when Harley begged Obie to give him another chance, Obie told him to come in the next Sunday and he could go back to work. On Sunday, Harley came to work, did his pre-trip inspection of his tractor and trailer, and was ready to leave the yard when it began blowing light, flakes of snow. He grabbed his belongings, got out of the truck, and told Obie he couldn’t head out because it was snowing. I don’t remember all the cuss words Obie flung at Harley, but he certainly told Harley he was fired.

  When spring arrived, Harley called Obie and asked if he was looking for any good drivers.

  Obie’s replied, “Yes, I am, but I don’t know where in hell I can find any.”

  We never saw Harley again.

  Another one of Obie’s drivers that I remember was Tom, a local, middle-aged man, who had worked quite a few jobs over the years, so I suppose his stint as one of Obie’s drivers just added to his reputation as a Renaissance man.

  I played Little League baseball with Tom’s son, Tommy, who was one of our small town’s celebrities. One winter, after an extremely heavy snowfall, many of the local kids were sledding down a long steep hill on a busy stretch of highway. I’m not sure what was on the rails of Tommy’s sled that day, but the sled moved like greased lightning and he went flying past the spot where everyone else’s sleds had stopped and picked up even more speed going down another small hill. He was going so fast that he was unable to stop for a red light. His sled zoomed underneath the belly of a tractor trailer that drove through the intersection at the same time. We all cheered, whooped, and hollered when he emerged from under the trailer unscathed; we’d been sure he was going to get squished under its tires. The truck driver remained none the wiser throughout the whole ordeal, and Tommy certainly beat the devil that snowy day.

  Tommy’s dad, Tom, didn’t have his son’s good fortune, and one time returned from a trip in his Emeryville International truck with the entire right front of the tractor demolished. Tom said that a deer had been loping across an open field beside the highway and just as he was driving by, the deer jumped the fence and landed on the highway in front of his truck, which was going sixty miles per hour. Some of the metal parts of the truck (back in the day, there was more metal than plastic) had remnants of deer hide and hair embedded in them, so it was a believable story. This wasn’t the first time, and wouldn’t be the last time, a tractor came home with deer damage, and times haven’t changed much in that regard. Deer strikes are still damaging scores of trucks each year. I think it’s fair to say that truckers are doing their part to help reduce the deer population.

  The fact that Tom had many types of employment had a lot to do with his frequent alcohol consumption. When I was seventeen, Tom asked if I wanted to ride with him to pick up a load of furniture in Asheville, North Carolina, about thirty-five miles away from Obie’s farm. I had nothing better do to, so I hopped into the truck’s passenger side and we headed out. As soon as we were out of sight of Obie’s house, Tom pulled over at a wide spot and asked if I wanted to drive. I had occasionally driven a truck over the past several years, but I didn’t yet have my chauffeur’s license. I happily accepted anyway, crawled behind the wheel, and began driving up the mountain to Asheville. As I tested all ten of the truck’s gears, Tom relaxed into the passenger seat and opened a pint of Hiram Walker’s Ten High bourbon. While we inched along in the traffic of Asheville’s Tunnel Road, he flirted with every woman we passed. (I learned an awful lot about flirting that day.) By the time I’d picked up the load, driven us back down the mountain, and dropped the trailer at our warehouse, Tom was shit-faced.

  It wasn’t long before Obie had to let Tom go. Obie knew that Tom was drinking and driving, and that he wouldn’t put the bottle down anytime soon. If he kept at it, it was only a matter of time until someone got hurt.

  And Tom certainly wasn’t the only driver who had a strong relationship with the bottle. My father was a man who enjoyed his bourbon, and I learned early on how to detect a man’s alcohol level by his breath, and there were many times I knew a fellow had been drinking before he uttered his first word.

  Far be it for me to know why Obie tolerated this as much as he did. I can only assume it was because he was always in need of drivers. There was a dearth in the industry then, and there still is today, which means that a good interview with the owner has always been likely to guarantee a man a trucking job. There were no drug or alcohol tests required at the time (today they’re routine), and a man’s ability to hold off from the bottle for at least a short time was measured by showing up sober for his initial interview. Past employer verification hardly ever happened.

  After a driver began working, his job performance could quickly betray his blood alcohol level. If he didn’t show up for work and didn’t call to let Obie know he wouldn’t be in, odds are he was drunk. If he showed up for work and was staggering from his personal vehicle to his truck, he was drunk. If he returned from a trip with a damaged tractor or trailer and no good excuse for the damage, yep, you guessed it: probably drunk.

  Other than truck drivers, Obie usually only had one man who worked around the farm. We called him “Bus,” although I’ve never known whether that was his given name or a nickname. He was working there when I was born, and stayed on the farm for many years. I remember him still working there when I left for college. He was a man of small stature—probably didn’t weigh much over 120 pounds, and stood around five feet three inches tall—and was similar to most respectful men of the time, removing his hat in the company of a woman and holding the door open for others.

  Obie gave Bus a few dollars every week, but only paid him all his wages once every couple of months, and Bus never seemed to have a problem with that. When money was in his pocket, Bu
s would always stop by the local bootlegger’s house before he went home, and get good and liquored up. The alcohol must have made Bus think he was a big man by the time he got home, because once there he would commence beating on his well-over three hundred-pound wife, Sarah Belle. The sheriff’s office was usually summoned when this happened, and Bus would be sent to jail. He would work as part of a chain gang for thirty days, and on day thirty-one, Bus would come walking up Obie’s driveway, with his hat in his hand. He would find Obie on the back porch and Obie would just grin at Bus and tell him to go on and get his ass back to work.

  One spring morning, I stood on the drawbar of the farm tractor, the beam across its rear end, and held on as Bus drove it down to the river bottom to disk the forty-acre field in preparation for corn planting. As we rode, I smelled last night’s liquor on Bus’s breath, so it was no surprise when, as we reached the field, he said he wasn’t feeling too good and was going to go over yonder and rest just a minute before he began. I nodded to indicate I’d be fine by myself and watched as he headed into the woods to find a cool spot. His “minute” of recuperating turned into an afternoon. We usually went back to Obie’s for lunch, but that day I picked some carrots, green onions, and cabbage from the vegetable garden beside the field and ate them instead.