Low-clearance adventures
I had never hit a bridge, and I wasn’t about to. At least, that’s what I thought. Trees were a different matter.
I had just made the trailer list at A-P-A Transport, the LTL that I drove for back in the late 1960s. You needed some seniority to drive trailer, and I had driven straight trucks for a couple of years. Driving trailer meant an extra 2 cents an hour or something equally meaningless, but it wasn’t about money. I had attained a life goal. I was driving a tractor-trailer.
It wasn’t my first time driving a semi. I had done that once already for another carrier. This was different. Then I was a shape-up driver, what they called a casual. It was a one-day job. Now I was on a Teamster seniority list. I was a genuine tractor-trailer driver for a genuine commercial motor carrier – a trucker in the actual business of trucking.
For much of the previous two years, I had driven from A-P-A’s big terminal in North Bergen, N.J., to southwest Connecticut, where I delivered local freight and made pickups. I guess that’s why on my first day on the trailer list they sent me out with three stops starting in Norwalk, Conn., an old city on the Long Island Sound.
The New Haven Railroad – now Amtrak – went through the center of town. In fact, the corner of Washington and Main, once the center of the old city, is almost entirely under a very wide, four-track railroad bridge with a clearance of 11 feet, 2 inches. Other bridges in the old part of town were worse for trucks. One was only 10 feet, 5 inches. The sidewalk had to be a couple of inches less than that. Former Boston Celtics center Tacko Fall, who stands 7 feet, 6 inches, could not have worn a top hat under there. That part of Norwalk was a tough place for truckers, especially for drivers new to the area.
But not for me. I was a pro.
My territory
A-P-A’s straight trucks cleared the super-low bridge over Washington and Main, and I knew other ways under the railroad that weren’t as tight. My 40-foot trailer was only 12 feet, 6 inches, hardly a 13-foot, 6-inch, road trailer. Besides, this was my territory. No way would I take a roundabout route to get where I was going.
That’s how I came up to the bridge marked 12 feet, 6 inches –the same height as my trailer. I figured that the trailer height was probably a little less than 12 feet, 6 inches, and the bridge clearance just a little more. They probably provided at least some margin for error. It made sense. But just to be sure, I pulled up so the tractor was actually under the bridge, and the front of the trailer just inches from it. I hopped out to take a look. Sure enough, there had to be more than an inch of clearance. Seemed like enough to me, so under I went.
At my stop a couple of blocks on the other side of the bridge, I opened the first swinging trailer door and instantly knew something was wrong. It was way too bright inside the trailer.
Then I looked up
Uh oh. There may have been just enough clearance, but something – something small, a bolt maybe – had protruded down from the old steel beams somewhere under the bridge. Whatever it was, it had penetrated the thin steel roof and neatly sliced it open. The roof was slit from the front to the back as if a cosmetic surgeon had made a long incision. It must be an operation to remove my job, I thought.
They didn’t fire me, though. I guess they liked me. In fact, not long after that they brought me inside to work on company publications and advertising. That’s what I was working on the day of a planned photo shoot.
Destination unknown
It was a fine spring day in 1970. We had a U-Model Mack and a Strick van trailer – both all shiny and brand-new. Neither had been dispatched yet.
I was driving the truck to the shooting location in some pretty place or another. I forget where – maybe because I never got there.
It was close to lunch time when on my way out the gate in the splendid new truck, I decided to stop at my house which was more or less on the way. Peg would make me some lunch and the kids could see Pop in a great big truck. It was big, all right. It brushed some tree limbs along the narrow street I lived on. But it wasn’t a problem until I pulled to the curb in front of our house. As I slowed, the truck came to a sudden stop without my braking. And then there was a scraping, crunching sound followed by a loud thump. The sound was right behind me.
A very large limb from the tree I had just hit had come down between the tractor and the trailer, its smaller branches scratching the back of the cab as it fell. Now, the right front corner of the brand-spanking-new trailer wasn’t really a corner anymore. It was kind of scrunched-up. There would be no photo shoot that day.
Looking back on it now, I really appreciate the guys who ran A-P-A. They didn’t fire me that time either. Funny thing is, that was the second time I had amputated a great big branch from a tree on a residential street.
The first was much earlier, before I had a family, when I drove for Nassau Cabinets delivering kitchen cabinets out of North Brunswick, N.J. Nassau had two trucks. One was an International with a standard furniture-style body, including an extension over the roof and hood of the truck. The other was a gas-powered Chevy with a two-speed rear axle and an unusual, homemade body. Like a furniture van, it stuck out over the cab. The body was built of welded angle iron and heavy-duty plywood. It was indestructible.
Evening plans
I was a single guy in my 20s at the time, and I had a girlfriend, Brenda, who attended Douglass College in New Brunswick. She had a key to my apartment, which was about 5 miles from the school. That day, she had taken a bus to my place and spent the day there studying. I was supposed to meet her after work, and we would spend a brief evening together.
But trucking is trucking, even if it’s just delivering kitchen cabinets. I was delayed in upstate New York State and would be late.
Normally, I would have parked the truck at the factory, taken the company pickup home, and then driven Brenda back to her dormitory later. Back in those days, Douglass had a weeknight curfew. All the young ladies had to be in the dorm by 10 p.m. Clearly, we would not be hanging out for that evening. In fact, I would have to drive the cabinet truck to my place, pick up Brenda and drive her straight back to her dorm to beat the curfew.
Brenda didn’t want her friends to see her in the big, ugly cabinet truck, and the closer we got to the college, the antsier she became.
Slowing down just yards from her dorm on tree-lined Nichol Avenue, the truck stopped suddenly. Brenda and I both lurched forward. For a second after that, we heard a crackling sound. Then, through the windshield under the truck body overhang, we saw an enormous branch fall in front of the truck onto the street.
With that, Brenda opened her door, jumped from the truck, and ran across the street. Then she walked normally back to her dorm as though she had never been in that ugly truck. She never even glanced back over her shoulder.
That left me to deal with the lumber in the street alone. It wasn’t easy dragging it around to the back of the empty truck and heaving it inside. It took more than a couple of minutes, and if any of the neighbors had called the cops, I was gone before they showed up. Leafy branches hung out from the roll-up door as I drove. I was able to drag the limb out of the truck and into the woods behind the factory.
That amazing angle iron and plywood van body?
It was a case of truck versus tree, and the truck had won. Aside from a mark on the plywood too small for anyone to notice, there was no damage whatsoever to the truck. Nothing.
Brenda was another story. Our relationship hit the pavement along with the tree limb. It was for the best. LL