Path Breakers By Sandy Long Several years ago, I stopped to have coffee with a brother driver I had been talking to on the cb. I told him I had noticed the five million mile safe driver sticker on his truck and how honored I was to meet him. His response set me back a little, he said, “I am honored to meet you. You are one of the path breakers of trucking; without women like you, who came into the trucking years ago, women wouldn’t be able to be truckers today like they are.” I started driving truck in 1972 while traveling the country with carnivals. Considering the attention I received when climbing out of an old beater truck held together with bailing wire and bubble gum at a fuel stop or cafe, we should have sold tickets for the show! Solo women were very rare back then even on carnivals and caused many to stop and stare. A friend of mine began driving in 1973. The drivers, who accepted her, were forced to strike because of their wives. The wives could not accept that a woman would be driving with their husbands. One wife caught my friend at a plant and had to be subdued after chasing her around the plant at a dead run. The companies hired women due to perceived quotas and caused anger among some male drivers. The problem came in because companies would often hire a woman with no driving experience over an experienced male driver thus fueling the idea that women were taking a man’s job. Some male drivers allowed anger and resentment to over-rule their common sense. I was climbing Needles in a castrated 1978 corn binder with a non-shiny 290 when a Sitton driver and a CRST driver came to my rescue after another driver tried to force me off the side of the mountain screaming, “You should be home making babies and cookin’ supper!” The two other drivers blocked my side and ran with me the rest of the way across. The attitude at companies was that we were too weak to do the job. At my first otr job in 1982, the personnel manager told me that he did not like women truckers because, “Women cannot unload 40,000 pounds of 50 pound sacks of potatoes!” My response was the same then as now, “you are right, just like male drivers, I would not unload 40,000 pounds of potatoes, I would hire a lumper!” We had to prove ourselves by running hard, asking for no quarter because we were women and handling the stress of the job as well as our brother drivers. This was not really hard for us, though annoying as we gained experience because almost every one of us women were not wanting to be treated differently because we were women, we just wanted to be treated equally with our brother drivers. We eventually overcame the resentment through hard work, perseverance and just plain tenacity. We owe a lot to our brother drivers back then too. They were the lead seats that taught us how to drive, welcomed us to driver’s tables in truck stops and shared their experiences and tips with us. They talked us through new situations and sang to us on the cb to keep us awake through a tiring night. They saw that we were not ‘bra burners’, just women who wanted to support ourselves better than what a menial job would do and that we shared the sense of adventure required to be a trucker. Were we path breakers? Perhaps, but it was with the help of our brother drivers.
Posted on: Sun, 27 Jul 2014 15:00:06 +0000
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