One midsummer Friday afternoon about five thirty, we heard the sound of air brakes behind us in Callahan’s driveway. The crew was all there under the tree, drinking beer and feeling easy and mellow. We knew that John had road drivers, but these guys weren’t a part of our work life. The whole point of having road drivers was to keep them on the road. I think John liked to keep it separate for another reason, which was the equipment. An owner-operator like Tim Wagner, who was expected by the van line to go anywhere anytime, needed to be properly equipped. The road drivers had the best and latest stuff; we, the poor local movers, got the junk.
The trucks we drove were a disgrace, and the equipment was often substandard. The equipment issue was always pretty high up there in the discussion ranks under the tree, and I was a vocal critic of Callahan management about it, as was everyone else. It wasn’t until much later, when I stopped to drop off something at Little Al’s house, that Al took me into his garage to drink a couple of beers and showed me all the equipment he had stolen from Callahan’s to outfit his moonlight moving business. Everything was stenciled PROPERTY OF CALLAHAN BROS. Al told me several other employees had similar setups, and then I became aware that the reason John wouldn’t invest in equipment was that he knew it would all get stolen.
It was considered perfectly acceptable to steal from John, whether it was overtime or equipment or boozing on the clock, but I never once saw anyone steal anything from a shipper. This is not to say that we didn’t open drawers or boxes, particularly if the shipper was good-looking. Then she could reasonably expect her dresser drawers to be ransacked for a look at the lingerie and sex toys. (When I started in the 1970s, it was always surprising to find a nightstand drawer with some kind of sex toy or lingerie. Nowadays it’s surprising to find nothing. My advice to shippers is to either to pack your erotica yourself or salt the lingerie drawer with plastic snakes or a loaded mousetrap. This will scare and impress the movers; always a sound option.)
Anyway, it was five thirty under the tree, and there, right out of the truck wash in Milford, parked behind us in all its glory, was Tim Wagner’s navy blue, chrome-hulled Peterbilt hooked to the almost-new Kentucky trailer. It was very possibly the nicest rig in the North American fleet. Tim saw us there under the tree and came over. We tried to come off as cordial but unimpressed. He turned down our offer of a beer, and someone tentatively asked if he could maybe take a look at the truck. Tim said sure, and he went around and opened the trailer and popped the lock on the passenger side of the Peterbilt. We checked out the trailer first. It was a mover’s Sistine Chapel. There were rows and rows of perfectly folded, clean pads. All the equipment had a place and was stowed perfectly. The hardwood floor was polished. The trailer resembled nothing so much as an operating room scrubbed for the next surgery. Then we checked out the cab. It had a maroon velour interior with lots of gauges and lights, a large padded steering wheel, two gearshifts, and an adjustable air ride seat. The sleeper had a full-size orthopedic mattress, a seat belt, a climate control console, and a quad stereo sytem. The bed had a white goose-feather duvet, and Tim had tucked in the sheets using hospital corners. Tim’s meticulous attention to order and system stood in stark relief to our own slapdash attitude toward machines and equipment. Aha! I said to myself. This was how it’s supposed to be done.
When the bunch of us finished checking out the rig, Tim went into the office to drop off paperwork constituting probably another thirty grand worth of revenue, came back, and climbed up into his Pete. It started with a roar and a whine. He let the air build up, released the brakes, and pulled out of Callahan’s lot with a hiss of the air dryer and a blast of the air horn.
Almost everyone under the tree had stopped drinking for a few minutes to check out Tim’s truck. But not quite everyone. On the far side of the lot stood Little Al, Ralph, and Bobby, clutching their Schaefer cans, facing away from where Tim’s truck had been.
John’s experiment with Tim Wagner proved so successful that he was keen to sign up more drivers. John liked having prime rigs out on the road with his name all over them as much as anyone. He liked dealing with long-haul drivers who were more polished than his regular crew. John also learned that Callahan Bros. was considered a prime agent among road drivers and that he personally was considered one of the straightest guys in the business, which he was. Word got out via Tim Wagner, and soon John signed up another defector from Morse named Willie Joyce.
Willie was twenty-three, not much older than me, when I first met him. He was five feet eight inches tall and weighed about 160 pounds. He had longish brown hair, green eyes, a face pockmarked from acne, and a pointed goatee on his chin. With his quick movements and his jumpsuit, he reminded me of a very intense elf.
I had worked late and it was about 7:30 p.m. The crowd had thinned out under the tree to just Ralph and Bobby and me, but the beer cooler was full. Willie pulled in with the new trailer John had just bought for him, though he didn’t have some fancy new tractor like Tim Wagner. Willie was driving an old faded blue GMC Astro 95 that didn’t even have a sleeper. He called it the Cornflake.
Willie lit over the fence and asked us if anyone wanted to make twenty bucks to help him clean up the trailer. There were no introductions. Ralph and Bobby had no use for road drivers, and Willie had no use for anyone just then except someone to work. He explained that he’d finished unloading 20,000 pounds yesterday in Chicago and had driven straight back to Connecticut last night and today because he needed to load 22,000 pounds tomorrow in Greenwich bound for Florida.