My Truck Driving Stories: And Then Some!

By Randy Myers

Driving the big rigs for thirty years can sure build up a repertoire of stories! Tough loads and smooth sailing, fun people, and the occasional old hat, I met them all on the road.

This one time, Id been having a streak of bad luck. It was summertime, and my AC broke. Then my favorite hotel on that route had no rooms for the night. The shop was moving slow and couldnt get my truck back when I needed it. Well, Ill tell all about it here. This is about the laughs and struggles of an everyday truck driver.

• Language: English
• Publisher: LifeRich Publishing
• Release date: Jun 22, 2018
• ISBN: 9781489717542

Randy Myers

Randy Myers started driving hay trucks on a farm when he was twelve years old. He joined the US Marine Corps Service at nineteen, and became a tank driver. Because he was a veteran, he was offered a job with a trucking company after he left the service. These are his stories from life on the road.

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Copyright © 2018 Randy Myers.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

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ISBN: 978-1-4897-1749-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4897-1754-2 (e)

LifeRich Publishing rev. date:  05/17/2018

CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

CHAPTER 1

We had lost our house in Tulsa and our jobs, so we moved back to Colony, Kansas where I grew up. It was small town USA, population 450 people. We both got jobs right away and a house. We were there for three months when the phone rang one night. It was an old high school friend of mine. He said they were hiring veterans where he was working and since I was a veteran, I figured I might as well give it a shot.

I knew he drove a truck, so I told him I didn’t have any experience. He said it didn’t matter. They would send me to school and pay me too. I didn’t have anything to lose, so I went up to Kansas City the next morning. I put my application in, and about a week later they called me up for an interview. I got hired the same day. From that day on, my whole life changed for the better.

I had to learn how to use a log book, and learn a new set of rules for truck driving. I could only drive for ten hours and work five hours then take an eight-hour break. Later on, they changed it to eleven hours of driving and three hours of work then a ten-hour break. At the time, we could only work 70 hours in eight days, then we had to take a 48-hour break! We had to keep track of our own hours to show the Highway Patrol or the Department of Transportation officials. We had to write down every stop that we made on our log book, and pull in and get our trucks weighed at every open weight station. All of this was because we were so big and heavy. We were 65 feet long and weighed 45,000 pounds empty, but we could weigh up to 80,000 pounds.

I was hauling brand new cars off the railhead and out of the auto plant to the dealers with a 200-mile range from Kansas City¹. It took me about a month to get accustomed to because I didn’t have much room to put the cars inside the truck. I had about 2 inches on each side with a big car. The old-style car-hauling trucks had big posts to avoid with each vehicle you load on it, and with pick-ups, there was even less room. Plus, the trailer sat real close to the ground, so you had to watch out for dips in the road and railroad tracks or you would high center with the trailer. You had to watch out for tree limbs and low underpasses too.

As low as it sat, the back of the trailer still wouldn’t come down all the way. Every time you stopped to unload, you had to pull out long aluminum skids and piece them together. It is a wonder I don’t have back trouble from that, but I was young and willing to do anything to get my job done. The truck had these great big cylinders all over it. It had hydraulic lines going everywhere and levers to activate them. That’s how it lifted the cars up.

You had to put a pin underneath each post, so a car wouldn’t come down if you broke a hose. This was very important because you wouldn’t want that car to come down on top of you. I value my life more than that. The hydraulic system was good, and it could lift a lot of weight, but the lines were also very old and broke quite often.

Those big trucks took a lot of room just to turn around, so you had to watch out every time you went around a corner. When I went to load up the new cars at the railhead, l had to wait in line for three or four hours just to get onto the lot. They paid me for waiting though, so I didn’t care.

CHAPTER 2

One time, I loaded this one car that had hail damage all over it, but I delivered it to the wrong dealer. So, I called up the company and told them what I did. They said to load it back up and just take it to where it goes. When I got to the right dealer, there were about four or five salesmen looking at the car that I delivered. They didn’t know it was the wrong car. So, I unloaded the hail damaged car, and jumped in the good car and loaded it up.

I walked back over to the salesmen and the sales manager came out and started badmouthing my company. I don’t think he knew who I was. After about five minutes of listening to him cussing my company, I told him that I work for the company he was badmouthing. The other guys were still standing around, and I asked the sales manager where I could find the phone. He said it was over on the wall. I walked over there, dialed up my company, and then turned around. There wasn’t anybody in sight. The manager could sure bad mouth my company, but he wouldn’t talk to them. They took the car for storage only after I went in and talked to them.

Another trip, I was in Southeast Kansas and had a blowout on one of my tires on the tractor. I called up the company and they sent me to a nearby town. When I got there though, all the mechanics were on lunch and weren’t going to be back for another thirty minutes. I walked upstairs to the break room, and there they all were, playing poker. They asked me if I wanted to play and I said, Sure, why not? I don’t have anything else to do!

I could not believe the luck I was having playing cards. I took all their money in about 15 minutes, and then all of a sudden, the door comes flying open and a guy calls up saying, Hey there, driver! Your truck is ready. So I took all their money, went downstairs, settled up with the guy who fixed my tire, and then hit the road.

The company had this one run that went out to New York City to deliver a load, and then swing back with a load of vans from Baltimore. I didn’t like it because you had to unload in the middle of the street and the traffic was terrible. There were low underpasses everywhere, and you could only get in and out at two places from downtown. I knew this one guy out there, and all he did was stand at the street corner in front of this low underpass and direct drivers on how to get around it. It cost $30, but the company paid for it if you had a receipt, which he wrote out.

I went out there every week, for about three months, and once I hit a low underpass and totaled one of my cars. The low underpasses on the New York side are all marked a foot lower than what they actually are. On the New Jersey side, however, they are marked exactly at their actual height. I had been over on the New York side all morning and half the afternoon. So, when I got over on the New Jersey side, I saw the 13 feet 2-inch underpass and thought it was 14 feet 2-inches. I never even slowed down when I came up to it. The top car hit the underpass and set up quite the ruckus. I got to the dealership and they accepted the car for storage only.

When I got back to Kansas City, I went in and told my boss that he could fire me, lay me off, or do anything he wanted to me, but I wasn’t going back to New York City. He must have liked me because he didn’t send me out there anymore.

CHAPTER 3

I had worked for that company about four years when I heard the plant was going to close down, and we were all going to have to transfer over to the other plant. We were going have to transfer over onto their board, and I was going to lose a lot of my seniority. I didn’t like that, so I quit. It only took me about a week to find another job. I was loading automotive parts up in trailers, and moving the trailers in and out of the dock. I had to start work an hour before everyone else, so the other guys would have trailers ready to load.

I did that for about a year before I got tired of not being on the road. So, I went in and told my boss I wanted to start driving again. He told me that I could be a fill-in driver, in case somebody got sick or quit, and I could still work on the dock when I wasn’t driving. I liked that, having the best of both worlds.

The automotive company had these new trailers with their logo all over it, and I’ll have to admit they looked pretty sharp. One night I was up in Lincoln, Nebraska, and going through town there were a lot more cars than usual. I couldn’t figure out what was going on. I noticed there was a lot of old cars on the road and a lot of people in lawn chairs on the sidewalk. I would toot my horn every once in a while and wave. When I got to the edge of town I rolled down my window and hollered at someone to ask what was going on. He said it was a parade, and that is why I saw all those old cars! I was part of a parade and didn’t even know it.

I made my deliveries there in Lincoln, and went on down about forty miles to another dealer and pulled in. It was pouring down rain, so I waited for about ten minutes for it to let up. It never did. So, I jumped out, got soaking wet, made my delivery, and got back in the truck – and then it quit raining. That is usually the way it went for me.

Another time, this other driver and I were just outside of Denver, late at night. Going in, I had the other driver pull over so I could go pee, and while I was outside I could smell something burning. I couldn’t tell what though, so I jumped back in the truck and climbed into the sleeper. I was going to have to drive on the other side of Denver.

The other driver hollered at me about two hours later saying, Hey, look at this! I got something for you to see. I knew there was something wrong from the tone of his voice, and when I got up to look, there were two tires and a brake drum sitting alongside our trailer. The other driver had been making a turn really slowly at this dealership, and one of the wheels fell off. Then I realized what I was smelling earlier that night. The wheel bearings had burned up completely, and that’s how the wheel came off the axle. I am just glad we weren’t going very fast.

That was Friday night, about midnight, and we finally got going again early Monday morning. The mechanic fixed it right there where it sat at the dealership. It was as good a place as any, and the truck wasn’t in the way. Of course, they had to special order the axle because they didn’t have it in stock.

Two weeks later, I went back out there with another guy, and I was listening to the radio that morning saying they were going to have a hundred mile