Book Review: A Trucker's Tale

Aug 23, 2023 - 2 years ago

A Trucker’s Tale: Wit, Wisdom, and True Stories From 60 Years On The Road by Ed Miller

A Trucker's Tale

In A Trucker's Tale, Ed Miller gives an inside look at the allure of the work and the colourful characters who haul our goods on the open road.

A Trucker's Tale
In the Preface to his humorous memoir, Ed Miller warns: “I don’t have many tall tales to offer—the stories in this book truly happened to me or to truckers I know,” comparing his recollections to fish stories that grow and change over time. Stories that change as they are passed from CB radio to CB radio.

Ed’s story begins on the farm, growing up with his boisterous trucking family. His love of trucks and equipment stems from his hard-working granddad, Obie, and the adventures he and his siblings would get into on the farm.
In the late 1960s, Ed joined the Navy Seabees as an equipment operator and truck driver, and promptly got shipped to Vietnam. In the book’s section “Military Trucking,” Ed weaves a fascinating tale of this troubled time, with gruff humour and a frank look at the challenging conditions.

One story in particular that had me chuckling, was when Ed had to truck a load of steel plates on a flat deck, which weren’t particular well tied-down. When rounding a corner on a twisty jungle road — at top speed, of course — the load slid off the deck and almost took out a jeep transporting a Colonel! Ed then had to endure the humiliation of watching the Colonel teach him how to properly tie down his load, using every rope and chain available. Lesson learned!

Back home after the war, Ed’s trucking life began. Starting in the days before cell phones and GPS navigation, Ed recalls the many challenges truckers faced when long-hauling without the use of those modern conveniences.
Ed Miller met many colourful characters over his decades on the road, and then later when he became a transportation manager at many of the steel shipyards in the eastern U.S. This book is full of those characters, both good and bad.

Ed's vibrant, no-holds-barred tales are hilarious and heartwarming, sometimes cringeworthy or unbelievable-recollections of heroic feats. Some stories bring to light the small acts of kindness and grand gestures that these Knights of the Highway perform each day, as well as the safety risks and continual danger that these essential workers endure. Together they paint a compelling portrait of one of the most important but least-known industries and reveal why Ed, and so many like him, just kept on truckin'.

About the Author
Ed Miller was born into a family of truckers in North Carolina and began driving tractor-trailers at age thirteen and moving trucks around his family's farm or backing them into the dock at the warehouse yard. He has more than forty years of management and ownership experience in many aspects of the motor carrier industry, including flatbed, van, refrigerated, specialized, and transportation brokerage. From 2003 to 2010, he worked in the Office of Freight Logistics at Maryland's Department of Transportation, where he served on numerous county, state, and national transportation and research advisory committees. Today he is a part-time school bus driver, working as a substitute/trip driver transporting students or taking school teams to sports events. Ed grew up in western North Carolina and attended East Carolina University before serving in the US Navy Seabees. He is a father of three and a grandfather of two, and lives with his wife in Rising Sun, Maryland.