A Trucker's Tale – The Early Years

Oct 25, 2023 - one year ago

My two brothers, sister, and I grew up several hundred yards from our grandparents, which was great because we could spend most of our free time at their house.

A Trucker's Tale - The Early Years — *1966 B81 and 1979 Superliner.*

Our granddad, Obie, was a self-made “jack-of-all-trades.” He owned a successful Ford dealership until he had to close it thanks to the Great Depression in 1929. In order to keep his family fed, they moved to the mountains of Tennessee where he worked as an equipment operator building a railroad.

As the economy got better, he bought a 168-acre farm, and through the years, he had dairy cows, horses, chickens, pigs, dogs, and cats. He made silage to feed the cows from the corn he raised, and I can still smell the sweetness from the ingredients he included with the finely chopped corn, including the stalks. (He also had a huge bull, Jonathan, of which he was very fond, or at least he was until the day Jonathan chased Obie and my dad up a tree. Would you believe Jonathan left the farm within a few days?) Obie also had all kinds of farm equipment and we brothers learned, at very early ages, to drive and operate farm tractors, farm trucks, backhoes, bulldozers, and tractor-trailers. We learned how to mow and rake hay into rows. A hay elevator was then pulled behind a farm truck with tall sides. (He did not yet have a hay baler.) Of course, we had to learn the proper ways of using pitchforks as it was necessary to fork the loose hay from the truck up into the loft of the barn. We also learned how to plow, use a disk harrow, plant corn and cultivate the weeds between the rows.

Anyone who has grown up on a farm knows it is really baffling how any of us reached adulthood with our eyes intact. Hell, for that matter, with anything intact! Do you remember the clod fights after a field had been plowed? All you had to do was to build several forts out of the clods and start throwing. The clods hurt even worse after they had dried-out some. How about “accidentally” taking pot shots at your brothers with your BB gun? Did you ever jump into a haystack, only to get a pitchfork stuck into the calf of your leg? How fast could you go downhill after kicking the Farmall M model out of fifth gear? If you go fast enough, you could not hold the steering wheel tightly because it was shaking so badly due to the front wheels shimmying. Somehow, and thankfully, a few of us survived to become truckers. As I wrote about some of the drivers in my book, including yours truly, I wondered if some of us ever really grew up!

One of Obie’s farm trucks was a red Dodge and it had two enormous headlights, one on each fender, and they were the size of medium-sized pumpkins. What do you think young boys could do with those lights? Damned right, while the men were loading hay onto the back of the truck, we straddled those lights and rode them through the fields, as though we were on horseback.

Although the Farmall “M” model was equipped with an electric starter, it seemed (to me) that the battery was usually dead, which meant that it had to be cranked using a handle inserted into the front of the tractor, to turn the crankshaft Using the handle always started the tractor, but the operator had to be careful. He had to hold the handle “just right,” because this method of cranking sometimes “kicked-back,” which could result in numerous broken fingers and arms. The safest way to hold the handle was more like pushing it down with an open-handed palm, rather than holding it with your hand completely encircling the handle.

When I was five or six years old, I was standing close-by watching Obie trying to crank the tractor by using the handle. After repeated efforts proved unsuccessful, Obie stepped back, hitched-up his britches, and issued, “goddam you son-of-a-bitch! I wish you would blow-up and go to torment!” Wow I was impressed! I am sure I had heard swearwords before, but this was real cussing, and I couldn’t wait to get home and use what I had just learned. When I did get home that afternoon, I stood in front of my little pedal tractor, pretended I was trying to crank it and yelled, “goddam you son-of-a-bitch! I wish you would blow-up and go to torment!” Well, it took all of about ten seconds for my mother to teach my backside that I should never use those words again. I learned that it was all right for Obie to use all the words he wanted, but I was never allowed to repeat any of them.

Over the next several years, I had to be extremely careful what descriptive language I used when I was in the company of grown-ups, especially my mother and grandmother. Believe me when I tell you that “watching my mouth” was a very hard thing to do since all the men, including my dad, Obie, all the men who worked for my dad, all Obie’s drivers, all furniture manufacturers’ drivers, hell, it seemed that every grown man, used several cuss words in every sentence. Being a dutiful eldest son and knowing “Practice makes perfect” I silently practiced to myself enough that I could cuss with the best of them before I was out of elementary school. Now that I think about it, I remember having to go to the principal when I was in the fifth grade, because Mrs. Gray thought I had uttered an inappropriate word. It must have been some iteration of damn since I remember writing it a several million times on her chalkboard! (I guess my practice wasn’t always silent.)

Ed Miller has more than 40 years of management and ownership experience in the trucking industry. Today, he is a part-time school bus driver, published author of A Trucker’s Tale, and regular contributor to Supply Post.He is a father of three and a grandfather of two, and lives with his wife in Rising Sun, Maryland.