Word: truck
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...truck is their horse and they are I the cowboys," says smooth-talking Richard Moyers, a vice president for Transport City. And it is true that they come on in Stetson hats, tooled leather belts and pointy-toed boots trimmed in iguana or wildebeest. But the men who roll into Transport City do not have the lean, weathered look of wranglers. Those pearl-buttoned denim shirts barely cover bellies bulging out from too many orders of mashed potatoes and chocolate cream pie. These cowboys are at home not on the range but in the claustrophobic cabs of 18-wheel trucks...
Twenty-four hours a day, the drivers jockey hundreds of big rigs-reefers, dry boxes and flatbeds-in and out of the world's largest and most complete truck stop. Transport City is a 51-acre, $7 million complex that is still growing in the outskirts of Atlanta, just off Interstate 285. It smells of diesel fuel and looks like a giant J.C. Penney complex, but it is the nearest thing to trucker's heaven yet invented. In it, tired truckers by the hundreds can fill up their 150-gal. tanks, take saunas, wash their clothes, grab...
...ready to do everything from change a 100-lb. tire in 20 min. to make an oil and filter change in 40. There are four en closed repair bays, and sometimes the big rigs are lined up three and four deep waiting for service. At another bay, an automatic truck wash with 16-ft. brushes scours the outsides of 55-ft.-long tractor trailers in eight minutes at a cost...
...Georgia offices of 29 nationwide freight carriers. "May I have your attention, please," an amplified female voice will vibrate through the room. "Anybody with a reefer interested in going to New York, New Jersey or Pennsylvania, please come to the desk." What a driver hauls depends partly on his truck. "Reefer" is jargon for a semi that carries refrigerated items, flatbeds tend to be for shop machinery, a dry box hauls everything else...
Seeking wage hikes of 40%, thousands of garbage men, hospital workers, gravediggers and schoolteachers were staging wildcat walkouts, even though Britain otherwise was supposed to be enjoying a week of relative labor peace. That erstwhile peace had been purchased at a whopping price. Some 80,000 truck drivers, whose four-week strike had dealt a crippling blow to trade and industry, were voting region by region to return to work. Well they might, since they had won a 21% pay increase for the year, hardly a farthing less than their initial 22.5% demand...