Also from my glory days...
The Casey Jones Express
Not all of my trucking exploits where bad. Once, while running a team operation pulling coast to coast doubles and occasional turnpike triples my co-driver whose last name was Casey and I, Jones, would pull stunts like say fast forward voice mail recordings that allowed us to leave longer messages on voice mail. (Record your message on a pocket tape recorder then play back into the phone at high speed.) And because we consistently out performed every other team the company employed, we were soon dubbed, The Casey Jones Express after the fictional railroad engineer of such fabled speed and skill.
One of Casey's hobbies was photography-- especially staged photography. So it wasn't really a shock to me when we rolled into the rest area along Interstate 80 near the Bonneville Salt Flats and Casey asked my help in attaching a 60' long banner to the side of our double trailers that read, "World Record in Class, Bonneville Salt Flats."
He had also hack sawed the man with the bowling ball off the top of an old bowling trophy, placed his camera on a tripod and set the timer. We stood beneath the banner holding the trophy between us as if we had really set a world record.
When we got to Nevada we stopped and had the pictures developed making sure to get an 8x10 color glossy which we slipped into a postage-will-be-paid-by trip envelope and mailed it to the corporate headquarters in Baltimore before making our way to terminals in Oakland and Compton, California.
Roughly 4 days after having snapped the photographs in Utah we rolled into the terminal gates in Baltimore. As a rule, going into the Baltimore terminal meant simply giving the security guard time to write down truck and trailer numbers before he pushed the button to open the gate but this time the gate didn't open. Instead, all the security guards came running, hands on their rusted revolvers and shouting for us to get out of the truck right now.
We were escorted to the company vice president's office, presumably because the company president was somewhere in the mid Atlantic ocean on his private yacht and had yet to get back to partake in our ass chewings. Finally, after some long distance telephone calls to the Utah Salt Flats Racing Association or whoever was in charge there, it was determined that their truck and trailers had never gotten any closer to the actual salt flats than the rest area along Interstate 80.
A friend tells me that 30 years later that same 8x10 color glossy still adorns an office wall somewhere in Baltimore.
The Casey Jones Express
Not all of my trucking exploits where bad. Once, while running a team operation pulling coast to coast doubles and occasional turnpike triples my co-driver whose last name was Casey and I, Jones, would pull stunts like say fast forward voice mail recordings that allowed us to leave longer messages on voice mail. (Record your message on a pocket tape recorder then play back into the phone at high speed.) And because we consistently out performed every other team the company employed, we were soon dubbed, The Casey Jones Express after the fictional railroad engineer of such fabled speed and skill.
One of Casey's hobbies was photography-- especially staged photography. So it wasn't really a shock to me when we rolled into the rest area along Interstate 80 near the Bonneville Salt Flats and Casey asked my help in attaching a 60' long banner to the side of our double trailers that read, "World Record in Class, Bonneville Salt Flats."
He had also hack sawed the man with the bowling ball off the top of an old bowling trophy, placed his camera on a tripod and set the timer. We stood beneath the banner holding the trophy between us as if we had really set a world record.
When we got to Nevada we stopped and had the pictures developed making sure to get an 8x10 color glossy which we slipped into a postage-will-be-paid-by trip envelope and mailed it to the corporate headquarters in Baltimore before making our way to terminals in Oakland and Compton, California.
Roughly 4 days after having snapped the photographs in Utah we rolled into the terminal gates in Baltimore. As a rule, going into the Baltimore terminal meant simply giving the security guard time to write down truck and trailer numbers before he pushed the button to open the gate but this time the gate didn't open. Instead, all the security guards came running, hands on their rusted revolvers and shouting for us to get out of the truck right now.
We were escorted to the company vice president's office, presumably because the company president was somewhere in the mid Atlantic ocean on his private yacht and had yet to get back to partake in our ass chewings. Finally, after some long distance telephone calls to the Utah Salt Flats Racing Association or whoever was in charge there, it was determined that their truck and trailers had never gotten any closer to the actual salt flats than the rest area along Interstate 80.
A friend tells me that 30 years later that same 8x10 color glossy still adorns an office wall somewhere in Baltimore.
