Eye on Trucking: Saying goodbye to a friend who’s parking it

By LYNDON FINNEY
The Trucker Staff

9/8/2009

Scatter shooting while wondering why when the price of oil futures goes up, diesel and gasoline prices go up in the present …

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School is out.

Old School that is.

For several issues now, our staff writers have been giving you their opinions on a variety of topics in monthly columns in The Trucker.

“Old School” is the name Jerry Breeden chose for his column.

If you’ve read his column, you can appreciate his down home approach to communicating with his readers, most of the time with stories about “the good ole days.”

(If you haven’t read his column or you’ve missed one, go to thetrucker.com and type in Old School in the search box).

Well, Jerry has decided to close down school and retire from newspapering.

Many of you out there have talked with Jerry at one time or another on the telephone.

We’re a close-knit group here at The Trucker in many ways, including how close we sit to one another, so sometimes we hear one another’s phone conversations and it didn’t take us long to realize how much Jerry enjoyed talking to truckers.

Like a lot of us in this business, Jerry cut his teeth writing obits and covering the police beat, and Jerry is still the best at getting to the bottom of a story that requires contacting law enforcement authorities.

In the truest sense, Jerry, like most of us here, are newspapermen and newspaperwomen.

We cut out teeth on manual typewriters, carbon paper, rubber cement and heavy black leaded pencils.

At the end of a shift, your hands looked more like you’d been playing in the mud than putting out the day’s news.

A couple of years ago, Jerry came down with cancer in his brain and his chest.

Against the odds, Jerry beat the disease, and today, he’s cancer free.

But the cancer (and the chemo and radiation treatments) took a toll on him, so having just turned 65, Jerry’s trading in his PC for a fishing pole.

Jerry is from Oklahoma, but we won’t hold that against him.

He has an OU license plate on the front of his car and when chemotherapy took away his hair, we’d usually come in and find Jerry wearing an OU cap.

If the Sooners weren’t doing well on a particular day, Jerry’d hang up the OU hat in favor of a Dallas Cowboy hat.

He and his lovely wife Jan are planning to move back to Oklahoma around the Keystone Lake area, after she retires from her job at the end of 2009.

He became a favorite of the lunch lady who visits our office every day because he’d usually dole out $5 or $6 for his second breakfast of the morning (McDonald’s was usually the first) and then he’d share his bounty with the rest of us.

Jerry has a wonderful sense of humor and an infectious laugh, both of which we’ll miss.

In fact, we’ll miss a lot about Jerry, most of all his friendship.

God’s speed to you, Jerry, even if you are about to become an Okie again!

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We’ve heard a lot recently about the government’s Cash for Clunkers program that provided a rebate for anyone trading in a gas guzzling, emissions emitting car for one that offers better gas mileage and won’t harm the environment as much.

We’ll, we mused around the office this week about suggesting the government come up with a program to help truckers paying the additional cost of buying a tractor with either 2007 or 2010 EPA engine technology.

Some OEMs have already released the cost of the 2010 technology, and we now know that it’ll cost about $15,000 more to buy a 2010 model than what a model with a 2006 engine cost.

Someone even came up with some names for the program.

You know, Money for Mack, Currency for Kenworth and Pesos for Peterbilt.

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Interstate 40 is one of the most heavily-traveled east-west corridors in the country, and as such, there has always been a premium on truck parking along that route.

Some states are trying to help.

We noticed the other day that the Arkansas State Highway and Transportation Department has erected truck parking allowed signs at the entrances to at least one former weigh station on I-40 just west of Little Rock.

We passed there one morning about 7:30, and on both sides of the interstate, the parking areas were still pretty much full.

We also noticed one other thing.

Trash on the ground.

Truckers have long begged for more parking areas other than at truck stops and travel centers.

Let’s not abuse what we’ve been given.

Put the trash in the receptacles provided.

The parking space you save may be your own.

The Trucker staff can be reached for comment at editor@thetrucker.com.

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