In The News

Looking back: hard times, part 2

One day in 1937 Ed Crocker’s old truck broke down on him for the last time. On a lonely stretch of road, with a cold cloudburst coming down out of the November sky just when he lifted the hood, he went to the cab cussing and took his 30.06 Winchester and fired one point blank into the hood.

“Didn’t do no good,” Crocker laughed. “But it didn’t do any harm, either. It was a miserable piece of machinery that broke down all the time. I’d have been better off with a mule.”

Interstate trucking was in its infancy then, and although pre-World War II gasoline engines and many poorly engineered “home made” trucks left a lot to be desired, trucking was headed for something better.

Regulation helped give trucking stability during the Great Depression. And the country was being opened up to mobility with the planning, if not the construction, of better roads.

You might call the Great Depression — which lasted from 1930, not long after the Stock Market crashed, until December 7, 1941, when we got into World War II—a vital link in the evolutionary chain of American trucking.

The newly formed Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) was given the power to regulate rates, entry, safety and accounting in the industry, beginning in 1935, bringing stability to an unsteady industry.

Mobility, better roads were on the horizon

“If I hadn’t driven a truck, or if the war hadn’t come along later, I don’t know if I’d have ever left Texas,” says Crocker, a retired trucker who now lives near Los Angeles.

Before the Depression, many Americans spent their entire lives within a 100-mile radius of their home towns. The Depression unpleasantly forced many folks to hit the roads. As farms and businesses failed, men and families drove, hitched and hoboed their way across country looking for something better.

World War II gave even more young men their first looks at other parts of the country, as well as the world. And with the development of better roads and more dependable transportation, mobility eventually became an American habit and a national option.

One task of the Roosevelt-brainchild Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), which helped put Americans back to work with government jobs, was that of building better roads. In the late 1930s, as it became clear to Roosevelt the U.S. was likely to become involved in another global war, he proposed and Congress approved an intricate system of national defense roads—four lane highways over which troops and military equipment could be easily and quickly transported wherever needed, from coast to coast.

These roads would also serve to evacuate mass segments of the population if attack made it necessary, always having two lanes open on each side, with no traffic coming the other way to slow things down. This system of national defense roads became our Interstate highway system.

But in the ‘30s, most roads were horrible. Highways were turtle-back roads, humped in the middle, allowing water to drain off at a 90 degree angle, causing trucks to flip almost as if on cue, even in dry weather.

Still, some roads improved. Many dirt goads were graced with gravel for better traction. More old roads got paved and more new roads were built.

Slow going, hard beds, bad food

These days, truckers take non-stop driving, 55 to 65 mph averages, good road food and nice motels for granted. But in the 1930s, it was hard going.

For example, a trip from Atlanta to New Orleans was 550 miles. But it took 15 hours to make the trip — that’s an average of just over 35 miles an hour — provided you didn’t break down. Because in those days, besides bad roads there were all those little towns you had to go through. No interstate highways, no bypasses, no way through populated areas except through the middle of town. You had to stop at every stop sign at every corner.

Seats were hard and uncomfortable compared to today’s truck seats. There was, of course, no air conditioning in the summer, although some truckers would rig up little dash fans. If you drove through the deserts, or most hot places in the summer, you did your driving at night, which was cooler but even more dangerous, because not only were the roads poor, they were ill lit and vision was always a problem. If you drove in the winter cold, you kept your coat on.

Driving a truck in the heat or the cold, or even in the best weather, was draining and tiring, and in 1937, the ICC passed a law that a driver couldn’t drive after 60 hours on duty in a seven-day period, or 70 hours in an eight-day period—out-dated rules today, but at the time it was a very good law.

The Hyatts, Holiday Inns and the like weren’t even a dream in those days. You might find a room at a “tourist court,” or something just called “cabins” along the route for a quarter or 50 cents a night during the Depression. The rooms were pretty stark--not much more than a hard bed and maybe a fan if you were lucky enough to find one in the stifling heat of summer. If you have seen trucks with early sleeper cabs from that era, you know that the sleepers were tiny and cramped. Imagine trying to catch a little shut-eye in one of those early sleepers in, say, Alabama in about mid-July.

The roadside diners and gas stations in those days were the forerunners of the modern truck stop. In the beginning, there was just a station and a couple of gas pumps. Maybe later the owner decided to serve up sandwiches or maybe cook hot meals. An enterprising proprietor might put up a couple of cabins next door to the station and diner.

That was the first generation of truck stops. The second generation evolved with the physical plant away from the diner and gas pumps (in the 1950s when PureOil, Skelly and a few other oil companies got into the business), moving into bigger buildings and adding touches like dormitory-type showers. The third generation truck stop came in the mid-1960s with the advent of the first million-gallon truck stops, upgrading the image considerably and adding things like private bathrooms and even exercise rooms. Now, the newest generation truck stops are evolving back to a more personalized concept. So, those old gas station/diners were actually the great-grandfathers of the great American truck stop network we know today.

Better shipping methods helped industry flourish

Shipping methods improved steadily in the 1930s, especially the shipping of certain perishables, such as poultry.

In the 1930s, a man named Jesse Jewell, out of Gainesville, Ga., started the perishable poultry hauling business as we know it today, with ice-pack hauling. Prior to ice-pack units — which were insulated vans that used wet and dry ice — chickens had to be shipped live.

That’s how cities got their poultry. When chickens were first shipped freshly killed, the heads and feet were cut off and the guts left in. The housewife would have to clean and dress them.

Jewell was the first to ship poultry with the entrails removed, using the ice-pack units, so that all the housewife had to do was buy the already-dressed bird from the grocery store and cook it.

But it wouldn’t be until nearly the end of the war that reliable refrigerated units were built. The best early ones were built by Thermo King, and when the reliable, durable diesel engines were added to the tractors after the end of the war, all sorts of perishables that had never before been shipped by truck could now be shipped across country over the roads.

But it was the development of ice-pack poultry shipping in the late 1930s that led to the eventual development of the refrigerated truck, which would create an entirely new segment of trucking industry, expanding it immensely.

Hay-hauler’s last nickel turns to empire

When the Depression first hit, northwest Arkansas was known as a center for growing apples. Now you’d be hard pressed to find an apple tree around there. That shift in the area’s economy was partly due to a fellow hauling a load of hay to Fort Smith in the early days of the Depression in an old truck his father had given him.

The trucker was down to his last nickel when he hit the city limits of Springdale, Ark., in 1930. He didn’t have enough funds to continue on. So he ended up working in Springdale and sending for his wife and baby son who came down to join him from Kansas.

It took the man, John Tyson, nearly nine years to get the resources to form his own company, Tyson Foods, which he later passed on to the baby son, Don Tyson.

Apples were seasonal, but poultry was something people consumed every day.

Gas engines weren’t dependable; diesel made debut in ‘30s

The gasoline-powered truck engines in those days would jiggle and vibrate, shake and shudder, and break down constantly. A driver in those days had better be a hell of a mechanic.

While the diesel engine can achieve high torque with low rpm, a gas engine cannot.

The first diesel engines appeared on the market in 1931, but those were made for off-road, heavy equipment use only. Those first diesel engines, such as the ones Caterpillar made, weighed a hefty 5,000 pounds — far too heavy for on-road trucks.

Some passenger trains had diesel engines in the mid 1930s. The Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railway’s (CB&Q) “Zephyrs” were among the first of the streamlined trains.

And, in 1936, a diesel-powered CB&Q “California Zephyr” pulled a passenger train from Chicago to San Francisco and averaged over 90 miles an hour, even with stops.

Prior to the introduction of diesel engines, manufacturers didn’t market engines separately from tractors. Gasoline engines came standard with tractors.

Cummins made the first diesels for the on-road, heavy duty truck market in the late 1930s, and Caterpillar came out with its first diesel for the on-road truck market in 1939 (the six-cylinder D468, rated 90 hp at 1800 rpm. The engine ran all day on $5 worth of fuel).

In fact, a D468 model Caterpillar engine is on display at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. In 1940, Cat introduced a second truck engine, the D312. Both the D468 and D312 were reliable engines and Caterpillar was counting on big sales, but along came the war and Caterpillar had to divert its diesel manufacturing to military vehicle applications.

Working around the clock during 1941, Caterpillar developed a supercharged 9-cylinder, radial, air-cooled diesel engine for tanks, which was designed and built by January 1942 and rolled off the assembly line by July 1943, to power the M-4 A-6 Sherman Medium Tank.

It wasn’t until after World War II that Caterpillar would get back into marketing diesels for the civilian truck market.

Diesel engines would revolutionize trucking with a power unit that could run many, many times as many miles as its old, gasoline counterpart, giving trucking the reliable, durable machinery that, along with the improvement of the national road system, would allow trucking to surpass the rails as America’s preferred method of shipping. Diesel truck engines would become steadily more sophisticated and increasingly more valuable as fuel costs rose and fuel economy became such an essential factor in the bottom line of the industry.

Desperate energy generated ideas; war sired truck lines

World War II, which ended the Depression, would spawn many new truck lines that exclusively shipped war goods such as shell casings and petroleum and explosives. Many other truck lines prospered with government contracts to haul uniforms, food, shoes, and other supplies to bases and to airfields and ports for overseas shipping.

With the end of the Depression, hoboes began to disappear, the tar-paper “Hooverville” shanties were gone, and the Dust Bowl refugees who had made it through either went back home to farming or were integrated into the shock of urban existence.

After the Depression and the war, life would never be the same for America or for trucking. The mass migration to the cities during and after the war made the role of trucking even more significant.

The Depression had been tough on America, but it produced a kind of desperate energy that changed the country, eventually for its economic good.

Consider the realty: If John Tyson had had enough money to get that load of hay to Fort Smith, would there ever have been a Tyson Foods, a company that employs thousands of people in Arkansas alone and generates millions in revenues every day? Probably not.

Starvation, you see, is often the mother of innovation.

So, for trucking, the Great Depression was hard traveling on bad roads, sleeping on hard beds, and often being left by the side of the road in broken down rigs—often lucky just to get home at all.

But the Hard Times were also a time of great growth and development in trucking, a most important link in the evolutionary chain of what became, and remains, one of America’s greatest industries and professions.