Back in the day . . .

"Humpin to please" was Campbell's Express

 

Stopping on the side to help a brother trucker change a suicide rim tire or to pull the tube out and patch the hole. Getting your arm through the steering wheel to try to shift the two stick tranny on the old "B" model Mack. Power steering! yeah it took all the power you had in both arms to turn that 22 inch wheel. Stopping for ice and dripping chicken all the way to the windy city. Traveling through Monkey Town, Smoke City, Music City, on the way to Looy ville on US 31. Was no I-65 back then. Fuel at 27 cents a gallon and using kerosene with a couple gallons of oil when the station was out of diesel. Shiny 290 was a big engine. Detroits were known as slobber mouths. I rember those days but I cherish the Cab with air that actually cools, the power steering, tubeless tires, single piece rims, air ride chassis,cab,seats, and trailers. Yeah, they were the good old days but I think the better days are now and in the future as far as driver comfort is concerned.

 

Driver comfort may keep getting better, but I wonder what kind of crazy emissions crap they're gonna come out with in that future, sooner or later we're gonna be driving battery powered trucks, and I don't think reliability is going to be one thing that gets any better if the EPA keeps having its say...

 

Couldn't agree more--and you say people who are in plastic trucks etc....also true---BUT--for those of us(like myself) who did start out on a B-MODEL--there darn sure wasnt any plastic in them!! LOL--not much padding either!!

 

Or, how about a '65 jimmy with the 6v-92 detroit 2 stroke maken' all kinds of noise goin' down the road. As i recall, the only plastic in that truck was the comb in my pocket.

 

Back in the day,when I drove my first shiny 290 I didn't know what to do with all that power.

Pull into a truck stop down south and get a free truck wash with the fill up.

Georgia DOT had trams ams . Thier scales were manual and you sit there and watched the needle swing.

The Chevron in El paso was the best. Mexicans would pack diesel across the river and fill your truck up.

Go to the phone booths by the fuel island and pick up the phone,then hang it up and step outside the booth and someone would walk up and get you anything you wanted. You gave them the cash and when you went back to your truck "it" would be in the seat or sleeper.

Get on that desert floor and pump it up and you were left alone.

Run at night for hours at a time and see no one.

 

LOL yea lots of things have changed most for the worse but some for the better

 

Reading these posts brought back a lot of memories. There was a "Brotherhood" among truckers back then that is not seen today.
About the only thing that has improved in this industry are the trucks themselves. It's nice that I don't have to crawl over the dog house into a 3x7 cubicle, on a paper thin mattress, lol.
Stay safe.