Word: truck
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Just a few years ago, the nation's long-haul truck drivers were celebrated as the last cowboys. Sitting high and lonesome in 18-wheelers, they put the pedal to the metal, trying to outrun "Smokey" and middle-of-the-road conformity. The flip side of the image: stressful schedules and strained marriages. But now split-level suburbia is the new deal on wheels. An up-and-coming crowd of diesel outriders are bringing their homes and their wives along in fully outfitted, self-contained living quarters set behind the driver's cab. If they need a handle, call this...
Demand for the stretched-out sleepers began to heat up after a 1982 congressional decision allowing longer cab lengths without a corresponding cut in precious cargo space. A majority of the 15,000 tractors produced by California's Peterbilt truck company now have some type of sleeper accoutrement. Double Eagle Industries of Shipshewana, Ind., which expects to produce 250 of the longer units this year, has fallen four months behind orders. Made of aluminum to save weight, the mobile home-like sleepers range in length from 28 in. to 120 in. front to back and cost from...
...with indigestion. "Ninety percent of truck-stop food isn't worth speaking about," shudders seven-year Veteran Driver Tom Burghardt of Hicksville, N.Y. He estimates he will save $200 a month on motel and food bills with his new $22,500 Double Eagle Windjammer. Dave Kahlig and his wife Mitch of Fort Recovery, Ohio, have yet to install a microwave in their 66- in., $11,000 Double Eagle sleeper. But they have a refrigerator and cook foil-wrapped meats on the truck's engine between the red-hot turbo pipes. "It takes about 10 to 15 miles to cook...
...Atlanta, Arthur Davis, 46, a 6-ft. 1-in., 230-lb. truck driver, felt a gun in his back as he drew cash from an automatic banking machine early on Jan. 30. He instinctively wheeled around, knocked the gunman down, grabbed his pistol, put it to the prone man's head and pulled the trigger several times. The gun would not fire. "I wasn't going to stand there and let him kill me without doing anything," Davis explained. In another New York subway clash, Andrew Frederick, 25, saw two men trying to steal candy from an underground newsstand...
Claude Brunelle, 31, a security guard at the Turkish embassy in Ottawa, usually works in a bulletproof booth. But when three men parked their U-Haul truck on the grass beside the embassy entrance early one morning last week, he emerged from his booth, challenged the men, then suddenly pulled his .38-cal. revolver and fired. The interlopers cut him down with a fusillade, killing him, then blew open the embassy's front doors with explosives...