A Trucker's Tale – To Be Frank

Jan 21, 2026 - 4 months ago

At the end of the January article, I mentioned that there was more to write about Frank.

A Trucker's Tale – "To Be Frank" by Ed Miller

To reiterate what I wrote, he reminded me a lot of my grandfather, Obie, in that he was a one-of-a-kind jack of all trades. Each of them relished the thought of tackling problems and fixing them. Throughout my life, learning from each of these men has helped me figure out ways to repair what needed to be fixed.

Not that Frank, or Obie, had anything to do with it, but I learned an extremely valuable lesson at Frank’s s__t kicker bar in Baltimore. After several beers, I was listening to Frank’s tale of his SEEN US disease, and I ordered a pizza from the bartender. When she set it in front of me on the bar, I was either extremely engaged with Frank’ story, or maybe the beers, put I took a big bite of the pizza and the scorchingly hot cheese stuck to the roof of my mouth. Dammit! What pain! I couldn’t grab my beer fast enough. The next morning, an ER doctor said I had third degree burns on the roof of my mouth. Well, no s__t! He prescribed rising my mouth with Glyoxide for several days. Yes, it really helped. Lesson learned!!

We had a 40,000-pound capacity Pettibone forklift at our Baltimore terminal, which we primarily used for repositioning steel when truck axle weights needed adjustment. Another use was when one of the steel mills thought their plants would be hit with a work stoppage, or even a strike, so they would ship ahead of time, and ask our company to stack the steel in our warehouse and on our yard. The forklift saw a lot of action unloading steel pipe, plates, tinplate, and coils. During the winter, Frank had fabricated a workable snowplow that fit into the long blades of the Pettibone, so our yard was always plowed clean.

Sometimes, moving a heavy single steel coil proved to be too heavy for the forklift’s counterweights, and the rear wheels, which steered the forklift, would come off the ground. Yep, this made coil movement pretty tough. Frank would search the driver’s lounge for four or five of the largest truck drivers. These “counterweight” guys would stand on the rear of the forklift, which usually added enough weight to get the job done. (I am certain that OSHA would never have approved of the counterweight method.) Frank would have described this action as “putting something on the forklift that Ajax wouldn’t take off.”

Frank once commented, after observing an extremely, and I do mean extremely, overweight woman, “If someone told her to haul ass, she’d have to make two trips!” Another overweight lady received, “If someone told her to haul ass, she’d have to use a wheelbarrow!”

Frank made all his pithy pronouncements because of his desire to make people laugh. He did not have a mean bone in his body, and he was extremely careful that none of those folks—who had inspired his comments—ever heard the words he uttered. On the outside, he was a gregarious, happy-go-lucky, fun-loving guy, but inwardly, he was one of the most compassionate men I have ever known.

During the middle of a hellacious snowstorm one winter, a scroungy-looking, malnourished dog staggered into our trucking yard and tried to shield itself from the snow by laying-down and hiding between the two diesel fuel pumps. Each time Frank and I would try to walk up to her, she would shy away from us, although it didn’t take too long, after placing a bowl of warm milk beside a fuel pump, for the dog to realize that we could be trusted. She had no collar or tags, so it looked like she had found a new home.

Frank named her Baby and she quickly became his mechanic’s helper and best friend. A veterinarian gave her shots and worm pills, and informed Frank that she was in good shape. He told him good dog food would quickly take care of her malnourishment.

For the next two years, if you saw Frank, then you saw Baby. If Frank was working underneath a truck, Baby was lying beside him. If he was operating the forklift, she was sitting behind him. If he went on a road call, she was sitting beside him in his pickup truck. When he walked out onto the yard, she was by his side.

She learned to stay out of the way, or to lie on her blanket when equipment was moved in or out of the shop, but as Frank backed a tractor out of the shop one afternoon, Baby inexplicably left her blanket and began walking across the shop floor when one of the tractor tires hit her.

I was no longer at this terminal, but I learned about it and everyone related how Frank, after rushing Baby to the vet, found that she had some broken bones in her hip. The vet said she might have a limp, but he was confident of her complete recovery. Baby did a lot of laying-around and sleeping and her appetite was good.

A few weeks later, Frank got to work one morning, and Baby failed to greet him. When he turned the lights on in the mechanic’s bay, he found her lying on her blanket, and she had died during the night. We really don’t know what animals think, or why they decide what they do, but Baby’s vet performed an autopsy, since he also wanted to know the reason she had died, and he found that her stomach contained enough antifreeze to have killed her. Frank figured that Baby had smelled the sweetness of an open container of antifreeze, and who the hell knows why she drank it. Mere words cannot describe how this devastated Frank. I was told he cried like a baby, for his Baby, and I know he always blamed himself for leaving the antifreeze uncovered and out in the open. I do know he never had another dog at the terminal.

We had five inches of snow in Maryland a few days ago. Can you guess what pithy announcement I gave my family concerning what to “Put in a shotgun an shoot out the chimley?”

Ed Miller ([email protected]) has more than 40 years of management and ownership experience in the trucking industry. Today, he is a part-time tour 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.