Can You Imagine?

If it were the equivalent pay in today's money and I didn't have nannycams, tattletales, super coops and e-logs? Sign my arse up!

 

Had to bring your own antenna with vice grips welded onto the mounting bracket. CB, and AM/FM, speaker, all mounted into an old brief case, covered in bumper stickers, Lol. I wish I still had his old set up. It was cool. I gave him a GM factory Delco Bose radio w/ cassette and built in equalizer/amp for Christmas. State of the art set up. Old Man was jamming.

 

It's still being modified, batteries are going to be moved and changed out of the sleeper and hopefully gonna figure out a way to add a bunk air conditioner. Doing a slight modification to the pull out for the fridge this week since the new floor kinda gets in the way and adding finishing touches to the floor other than that I like the current set up but will roast in it if I head further south in the summer

 

I've never had any of those things in any truck I've ever driven. But then again I come from an era when you could actually walk into a truck stop restaurant, sit down at the counter, and have a good meal and a conversation with other drivers. We didn't cook in our trucks because we didn't need to.

 

My uncle was a lifelong trucker and as he described it, A lot of Truckstops in the back row had an empty trailer that had red carpet in it, and there would be parties that go on in the back row of many truckstops inside these trailers of various sorts. Obviously that doesn’t go on anymore. They didn’t need flatscreen TVs or game systems . They were allowed to get there “Escape” while being out on the road. That seems to have become a lost art form.

 

But then, breakfast was $1.25, coffee was a nickel if it wasn't free. Lunch and dinner were around $6. And diesel was 35 cent a gallon, with a 5 cent a gallon cash back to the driver.

 

I’ve been all over the country sleeping on the front bench seat of a 1-ton Ford, so anything with a real mattress, a functioning A/C, Espar heater and some room to stand up and take a leak into a jug without having to get out seems like a pretty sweet deal, but I’d have fun in anything that got down the road because there ain’t no cure for that white line fever.

 

Those old cab-over cabs and sleepers really trip me out. I’m mean what an ergonomic nightmare compared to a conventional.

 

You're speaking about an era that was way before my time. I cut my teeth in the early 2000s. The qualcomm was pretty new, I had a regular old Nokia brick phone, and I navigated with a Rand McNally atlas and a MapQuest book. You had to swipe your fuel card at the pump to get diesel, and then at TA it would print out a little ticket with your points on it. Then you'd have to go inside to get your fuel receipt and tuck it into a TripPak envelope.

 

I never had any of that stuff either. I always ate 2-3 meals a day in the truck stop. I did have snacks with me though.

Started driving in 1973 and was mostly concerned about getting ac, power steering, and electric mirrors.

I remember a Big R driver commented one day on the radio, that if Roadway could figure out how to get them to drive standing up, there would not even be a drivers seat......