Looking back: the Great Depression

The stock market crashed on October 29, 1929, and the national economy belly-flopped to an all-time low. Even if you had money, there wasn’t always anything in the stores to spend it on.

The Trucker News Services

9/19/2008

Hard Times. Men such as Woody Guthrie wrote songs like “I been doin’ some hard travelin.’” And was it ever hard travelin.’

There were two lane turtle-back roads that would flip a truck over almost as often as not … and secondary dirt roads that turned to mud when the rains came. Back in the days when nobody imagined such a thing as a double-bottom truck. You might run 54,000 lbs. legally in one state and only 7,000 lbs. in another, and that included the rig, the fuel and the driver.

The stock market crashed on October 29, 1929, and the national economy belly-flopped to an all-time low. Even if you had money, there wasn’t always anything in the stores to spend it on.

President Hoover said prosperity was just around the corner, but what really lurked around the corner were bread lines, foreclosures, bulldozers tractoring farmhouses flat, and Dust Bowl refugees cutting out in trucks and cars or hitching or hopping freight cars to the California promise land to pick grapes and peaches and apples, but usually just finding more poverty and desperation.

President Franklin Roosevelt won by a landslide in 1932 and pushed sweeping social and economic measures through Congress. He started the WPA and the CCC and got some folks working again. But hard times stayed with the country until World War II brought the boom.

Trucking was cut-throat

Until 1935, trucking was not regulated. It was genuinely cut-throat, dog-eat-dog. Like, a shipper might call Jackrabbit Express and ask their rate to ship 100 lbs. of shoes, and they might say, “A dollar.” So the shipper would call Atlanta-Asheville and ask them what their rate was, and they might say “A buck and a quarter.” And the shipper would say: “Well, that Jackrabbit Express … their rate’s a dollar.” To which the man at Atlanta-Asheville would snap: Then my rate’s a dollar, too!

There was no stability. You couldn’t build a truck line the way things were. So, on March 1, 1935, the Interstate Commerce Commission took over the regulation of the trucking industry.

Winston Teagle is a retired trucker who rose through the ranks to a trucking executive and who remembers trucking in the hard times. Today, he lives in Union City, Ga., near Atlanta. But in June of 1936, one year after regulation, he went to work in the trucking industry for Transportation, Inc., a company that had authority between Burlington, NC, and New Orleans, as what they called a “striker” on a pickup truck.

“I rode in the back of the truck,” Teagle recalls, not so fondly. “I would signal when the driver was making a turn, because in those days trucks didn’t have turn signals. When we’d unload, the driver would rest or smoke and I’d help unload. I worked 60 hours a week and I got paid $13.”

While Teagle was making $13 a week in 1936, over the road truckers were making $18 and glad to get it. On the two-lane roads, drivers would have a run like, say Atlanta to Charlotte. But they’d likely have to drive down in the day and spend the night in Charlotte, because the roads were so bad and the equipment so rickety that they couldn’t make it there and back in one day.

Trucking was still essentially a brand new industry in the 1930s. Teagle had gone to junior college and had been at Emory University when he ran out of money and had to quit in 1936. But he had learned to type and that turned out to be a big break.

He says the billing clerk and cashier at Transportation, Inc. were in cahoots with their hands in the till, and when they were found out they were fired. The fellow who owned the company learned that Teagle could type and he asked him if he wanted a job for $15 a week. Teagle jumped at the chance.

Within two years, he was promoted to rate clerk and was making $18 a week. About the time the war started, Transportation Inc. merged with seven other companies to form Associated Transport, where he was assistant terminal manager until after the war.

Weight and length laws inconsistent

In the early days of trucking, the laws governing the length and weight of trucks were inconsistent to the point of absurdity. Many truckers today will tell you that many of the laws governing trucking are just as absurd, but in those days, there was no central source in control of the national wheel. Prior to the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), you might be restricted to 18-foot trailers in one state and be able to run 30-footers in another state. Prior to 1935, Texas restricted the weights of truckloads to 7,000 lbs., and that was only provided that the trucks operated on highways that ran parallel to railroad tracks.

Winton Teagle remembers a specific incident that took place when he was with Associated Transport not long after America entered World War II.

To train young pilots, the government had hurriedly built Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. The problem was, as Teagle remembers, they had the fellows coming in to learn to fly, but they didn’t have enough food or beds or shoes and other needed incidentals. So, a government official contacted some trucking companies in Atlanta to ship those goods over to Maxwell AFB.

“Alabama had a law restricting trailers to 18-footers and severely less weight than Georgia’s 54,000 lb. limit and 30-foot trailers,” Teagle recalls. “We diverted five of our northbound 30-footers and loaded them with goods for the pilots at the base.

“At the Alabama border, the folks in Lanett, Ala., had seen 30-foot trailers, but only from across the river in Georgia. When we hit Opelika, we were stopped, weighed and checked and because we were overloaded, the police locked us up.

“Finally, Wylie Moore, who was with our company and had political connections, got hold of the Georgia Governor and got him to call the Alabama Governor and ask him: ‘Don’t you know there’s a war on?’

“So they finally let us out, and as of that moment Alabama raised its weight limits for truckloads to 54,000 lbs and 30-foot trailers, all because of that one incident.”

He also recalls that his company had a deal with the State of Tennessee where they could cross the border into Missouri and Kentucky at certain points with heavier loads than were normally allowed in the state.

But there was a scoundrel among the constabulary of Elizabethtown, Ky., who would just wait for trucks in come in overloaded. The fellow would actually chain the truck to a tree, then make the driver wait there until his company wired $500 to pay the fine.

“The driver would just sit there in the shade and wait,” Teagle says. “Come nightfall, that cop would take the driver with him and buy him something to eat at a local diner. He did that all the time.”

Crooked roads at 90 degree angles

Anyone who gets too nostalgic for the “good old days