Double Clutching

My father worked many different jobs when I was young but he kept returning to driving trucks. He said it was in his blood. He warned me that he would kick my tail if I ever became a trucker.

I remember him first driving a bread truck. Dad was a bread man, delivering fresh bakery goods to homes each morning. Bread men carried a big metal basket from the truck to the front door. Dad outfitted his with large fold-out trays and colorful display cards featuring the specialty pastries he left on the truck. The new trays boosted sales and Dad was promoted to district sales manager. But he soon found himself back behind the wheel. This became a pattern repeated often in his career; start as a driver, move up to the office, return to the truck. It happened, he said, because driving was in his blood.

A succession of trucks followed; cement mixers, ice delivery trucks, coal trucks, fuel oil trucks. My favorites were the tractor trailer rigs. He drove Macks in the fifties, long-nosed LFs and JTs with sleeper cabs, followed by a variety of early tilt-cab models like Gs and Hs. I also remember an awessome old Autocar, several Whites, a tilt-cab International, some Peterbilts and Freightliners. I especially liked a simple red Mack B-61 with black fenders and an aluminum add-on sleeper.

Some tractors were twin-screw, others had tag-axles. Some carried Road Ranger transmissions with two-speed electric rear ends, others were equipped with the Mack Triplex. My Dad was like an artist when shifting and could glide those twin sticks effortlessly through the gears with one hand, coaxing the knobs with his finger tips while executing a choreography of hand and wrist movements. I watched in awe as he would dispense with the clutch altogether, instead listening for the RPMs to fall to that sweet spot where engine and transmision spun in perfect unison until the shifter knob just fell into the next gear, guided by just the slightest nudge. It was poetry.

Can you tell what I wanted to be when I grew up?

I rode with Dad in the summers when school was out. He would awaken me at three in the morning to get a jump on traffic. We dressed alike, white T-shirt with a pack of Luckies in the sleeve, jeans with rolled cuffs, black engineer boots. We would catch breakfast at some road-side diner or truck stop, usually eggs and sausage with home fries and black coffee.

Those were the fifties, before air conditioning and CB radios. The wind was in our hair and drivers communicated by flashing lights and cryptic hand signals as they sped past each other in opposite directions.

Dad said I was there to keep him awake. I think he really just wanted the company. I learned to drink black coffee, smoke cigarettes, laugh at bad jokes and spend long hours in numbing silence watching an endless progression of utility poles and road stripes race toward me, then shrink away just as quickly, swallowed by a distant point in the center of the big side mirror.

Man, how I wanted to drive trucks! I still do. But I never did nor will, in tribute to my father. That may be the one decision in my life that pleased him most. I had not followed him onto the road and into a life of painful loneliness.

I never did become a truck driver. But, it is still the only thing I ever REALLY wanted to do.