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Show i Hie Rogues 9 Gallery I Stymied by a Truck Your task at the moment is to keep year car on the hlghwiy, avoid the soft shoulder and not get killed, so yon have little time to be looking at the tracker's sneer. By FRANK CONDON THERE is no sneer in the world as insulting and supercilious as the sneer of the modern truck driver, as he sits up there in his little pilot house, tooling his leviathan levia-than of the road and watching watch-ing you struggle by in your sedan. Now it must be a matter of record that truck drivers are good citizens, perhaps loving fathers, kindly husbands and all in all, a desirable class of men to have in the community, and yet I am continually having such painful experiences with them that I am prejudiced beyond saying. During the last few months, I have been driving copiously over our beautiful California highways and my relations rela-tions with the truckers have been more intimate than ever. On the larger and more repellent trucks, they travel two by two, like airplane pilots or love birds, and the man at the wheel always wears a stony expression, mingled with scorn. He holds to the steering gear and his face is a mask. The other one the one not driving Is the one who sneers. He sits on the right hand side and can sneer steadily for seventy miles. It is the custom on the larger trucks to have two pilots, so that one can drive and the other sleep or sneer. After a few hours, the rirtvAr .vphanff.l nlanAii find 4Vinn fenders, headlights and bumpers. In my humble opinion, these oil tankers have no business or right on the public roads. They plug along aimlessly and I don't believe they're really going anywhere. They merely pretend to be hauling oil and gasoline between Los Angeles and El Paso. All day long, you meet them, toiling over the hills, with thirty thousand gallons of gas for El Paso. All day long, you meet them, coming the other way with thirty thousand gallons of gas for Los Angeles. Why don't the ones that are in El Paso just stay there, and if the ones in Los Angeles An-geles would never move a wheel, everything would be square and each town wou.J have all the gasoline gaso-line U required. No Sense to It. There exists a state law supposed sup-posed to regulate these monarchs of the road, buf it doesn't The law states that when more than one truck and trailer are crawling along, thus making a caravan, the second truck shall remain at least three hundred feet distant from the one ahead. In theory giving the hapless hap-less passenger car a faint chance to duck in and out Do they do it? Do they remain respectfully three hundred feet away? Thirty Inches would be nearer the mark. The second driver worms up as close as he can and stays there and if you come upon seven or eight of these double trucks you may as well haul up under a shady tree. he becomes the sneerer or sleeper as the case may be. Try to Pass a Track. My definite complaint against all truck drivers is that they proceed at too slow a pace and secondly, they refuse to get over. It accomplishes accom-plishes nothing to blow your horn, Es the truck man cannot hear you nyhow and doesn't want to hear you. If your horn reaches his ears by accident, he merely pretends he didn't hear any horn and his feeling feel-ing is that you and your nasty little sedan have no business on the state I highway, annoying an honest trucker. truck-er. To my notion, the worst offenders are the lads who tool alone slowlv The other day I came upon a doz-eu doz-eu truck drivers in their kindlier moments, and it seemed a good time to get acquainted and see if they were like other men. Well, sir, they were. In the conversation con-versation that ensued, I learned many an interesting item and finally, fi-nally, said: "Well, why would any-body any-body want to be a truck driver, j when he could easily be something else?" Answer came from the man on the next seat He weighed over two hundred, wore a blue shirt open at the neck and a battered cap. He said: "I'll tell you why, mister. Trucking is better than hav-ins hav-ins a white collar inh vrhvt vjau on their oil tankers. I certainly hate and detest oil tankers and am always hoping they will catch fire and burn up, but they never do. California oil tankers are the worst of all, because following an old tradition, tra-dition, California must have the largest of everything and its oil tankers are simply prodigious. Each one usually has fourteen to eighteen wheels, enormous rubber doughnuts, about as large as a Toledo To-ledo cistern and when one of these babies Is going your way, the road is filled and it would take Lindbergh Lind-bergh and a compass to get by. Furthermore, it is never one of them, worse luck it's two. The second sec-ond mammoth is attached to the first by an iron bar and is playfully called a trailer. Each tanker holds about sixteen thousand gallons of gasoline, or perhaps it is sixteen million and at night they are gaily caparisoned with red, pink, blue, green and purple lamps and look like a repulsive Christmas tree. I average thirty-eight dollars a week and so do these guys and we get home Sundays." Where else can I do that?" "Yes," said the next man, "and last week, I pulled down fifty-one bucks." "Your pay changes weekly?" "Sure but usually, it's around forty bucks. When we start out we just keep on going till we get there, day and night one guy drives and the other sleeps, and extra pay for the extra hours. That's better than being a clerk, ain't it or pumping pump-ing gas in a filling station?" After this, it is my intention to be more tolerant and charitable and not to swear at the boys when a CQuple of oil hogs loom up ahead In the fog. I'll never forget the black and blizzardy night I slid off the pavement into a ditch, the concrete con-crete having suddenly turned into a skating rink, and found five large trucks buried hopelessly against the muddv banlr. Tt tvaa Hnlmu When you come up behind a couple of these tankers on an ordinary or-dinary hilly or curving highway, you might as well remain calm and not blow your horn or curse or do anything. The driver up in front is making an honest ten miles per hour and that is what you are going go-ing to do. He is perched up so far ahead of you that ordinary communication commu-nication is impossible and that is why we need these two-way radio I telephone sets on all cars, for then you could call up the truckman and have the following conversation: "Pardon me. Jack, but would nobody could move a wheel and the blizzard was like buck-shot "Pretty bad nighf I said genially. genial-ly. "Yeah." "You men have plenty of trouble, haven't you?" . "Yeah." "But" I said hopefully, "if you boys would all push on the side of my car, maybe I can wiggle it back on the road and start down hill." "Yeah," said the yeah man, "and who's gonna shove us out on the road?" T TnAJnJ -1 At mind letting me go past? I am down here right behind your left hand faucet and all ready to go by." The man would reply pleasantly and either let you go by or deny your request and if the latter, you could take a neat revenge by smashing into the back end of his trailer and knocking oil all your yieaueu cioijuenuy, xney . au came over and shoved like heroes and in fifteen minutes, we wormed out and I was creeping off down the road, leaving them to spend the night in the ditch. God bless 'em. And that is why, when I swear at a crawling oil tanker on the highway, I am not nearly as mad at the truck driver as I appear to be. Bell Syndicate. WNU Service. |