Word: truck
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Londonderry fracas was just one incident in an anniversary week that left eleven dead and 150 injured across Ulster. Among those killed was four-year-old Siobhan McCabe, felled by a sniper's bullet apparently intended for a British soldier. Another was Samuel Llewellyn, 29, a Protestant truck driver who was delivering a load of paperboard in the Catholic Falls Road area of Belfast to help patch up windows shattered in a bomb blast the previous day. Although Llewellyn was making the delivery at the request of a Catholic welfare organization, he was dragged from the truck...
Goons threw acid on the owner of a truck stop outside Detroit for displaying the magazine. A stopover in eastern Ohio was blown up for featuring it on a newsrack. Gunmen shot out the gas signs of a stop in Indiana and threatened worse if the display rack did not go. When it comes to circulation, Overdrive magazine has had some unique problems. They are the price that the muckraking journal, which calls itself the voice of America's independent truckers, has had to pay for documenting corruption in the trucking industry. In the past three years alone...
...hunt is the populist philosophy of the magazine's editor-publisher and sole owner, Michael Parkhurst. New Jersey-born Parkhurst, 41, became an owner-operator trucker at 17 but sold his rig after ten years and used the money to start Overdrive in Los Angeles, a major trucking center. He wanted "to wake the truckers up to the fact that they're slaves to a monopoly." Parkhurst would visit truck stops by horse for publicity, but service, not stunts, made Overdrive. It dug, exposed, and above all helped out. There have been graphic headlines (HOW YOUR SWEAT FINANCES...
Parkhurst also treats advertisers with truculent disdain. For example, he refuses to accept Ford Motor Co. ads because "they made a crummy truck," and both a Union Oil Co. division and White Motor Corp. have in the past pulled out their advertising after he rapped them. He also has to pay for lawyers to protect himself against an average of some $25 million in pending libel suits (he has won seven and never lost), and to maintain an electric gate at his shabby Hollywood offices to guard against midnight raiders and subpoena servers. Says one staffer: "He could be taking...
More often these days, though, the muscle is economic pressure exercised quietly by lawyers and skilled negotiators, and backed by the Teamsters' awesome power to shut down almost any company by cutting off truck deliveries. When faced by a recalcitrant manufacturer in the Los Angeles area, and increasingly elsewhere in the nation, the union subjects him to TEAM (for Teamster Economic Action Mobilization). Its essence: a quiet warning to retailers that if they continue selling the manufacturer's product, Teamster pickets will appear in front of the stores, carrying signs urging shoppers not to buy it. The method...