In Junior High, I frequently wore a vest with a Kenworth truck patch on the front. Not nearly as stylish as my buddy Mike's newsboy cap, but it worked for my aesthetic at the time. Walking down a school corridor one day, I saw one of the coaches eyeballing the vest's logo. As we neared, he pointed to the patch.
"Kenworth, huh? Been hauling hogs!?"
"No, sir, coach! Logs. Pig Pen hauled hogs in the Jimmy."
Absolutely no one in my group understood that exchange. However, Coach and I smiled and nodded knowingly at each other like two patrons of a secret society.
That brief interaction was a reference to the lyrics of C.W. McCall's 1975 single, "Convoy". The song hit #1 on several US and international charts and highlighted the struggles the trucking industry was going through at that time. In the aftermath of the oil embargo, Congress passed a slew of new laws from the Double Nickel speed limit to caps on the number of hours truckers could drive each day. These all made surviving in a struggling sector even more onerous.
The song recounts the adventures of 3 truckers in a small convoy heading from LA to the East Coast. Well before the days of cell phones, the medium of communication was the CB radio. I loved the song for the banter between the characters and its use of colorful trucker's jargon, finding it way more interesting than trying to wrap my head around Shakespearean soliloquies and iambic pentameter in Mrs. Marti's English class.
I was naturally jazzed when Dad installed a CB radio in the family van. Dad used to commute between Long Beach and NAS Belle Chase outside New Orleans, and the CB radio was his way of passing the time on the 2-hour drive.
The family took a road trip/vacation in that van one summer in the early 80's. We drove an epic loop west to Texas, north into Canada, east into New York, down the coast to Virginia, and back to Mississippi. For an entire month, I was mesmerized by that CB radio. Truckers were giving intel on alternate routes, where to fuel up, and warnings of upcoming speed traps.
That road trip became a classroom for informal road etiquette not covered in Driver's Ed. To this day, I still flash high beams at trucks passing me to let them know it's safe to merge over. As the rig slides back in, they'll give the proper acknowledgment of momentarily flashing hazard lights as a "Thanks!".
When I got my license a few years later, in what I thought was the epitome of cool, I installed a CB radio in the Mustang. However, there wasn't a lot of chatter in Long Beach. The radio is still in the garage back home in Mississippi. I guess I could install it in the Bronco, but it would likely get an eye roll from the redhead.
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