Running a thousand miles almost every day was no big deal to the outlaws taking power naps then come Home time they would sleep the entire time.I could never live that style nor would I ever want to.
I remember growing up, in the 80's & 90's my friend JR's dad ran for Single Source (Ruan) and when he was home, he'd be sleeping almost the entire time.
He wasn't a very good guy. Personality-wise he's like a caucasian version of the dad on "Friday". But morally he's more like.... Hillary Clinton.
One time JR's little brother got busted for stealing stuff out of airplanes at the airport & I remember the only thing his old man was mad about was that he got caught. He was yelling "Damn it how many times have I told you that if you're gonna be ripping **** off, don't be stupid & get caught".
There were rumors he was a crackhead but I never personally saw him do anything.
He had an FLD condo cab & brought me & JR on a short run to deliver car batteries to Walmarts in the MNSP area. He needed his mini-thins & asked me to get them out of a cabinet but I didn't know what I was supposed to be looking for, having never heard of mini-thins before. So he got out of his seat, had one foot on the sleeper floor & the other on the steering wheel to keep it straight while he dug out his mini-thins. This was going down I-94 in Wisconsin with the cruise on.
He spent most of the time b****ing about regulations & the "new breed" of drivers.
On the way back we stopped somewhere near Eau Claire at his cousin's house. I remember it was way the hell out on some chip-seal county roads & we had to stop & slide the tandems all the way forward & he still ran it through a ditch turning a corner. At his cousin's farm, the cousin handed us a couple of BB guns & told me & JR to go out & kill some deer. I was old enough to know a BB gun wasn't going to do jack squat to a deer but JR told me it was code for "get the hell out of here while we do something illegal we don't want you to know about".
I've never had an ounce of respect for the guy. Not as a truck driver & not as a person. The only thing I can commend him for is he's never run out on his family. He taught his older batch of boys to hunt & fish. I don't know about the 2nd batch, they're teenagers now. He's raising them by himself now that their mom died a couple years ago.
So I guess he's not the lowest on the moral food chain because he did his best to provide for his 800 kids (who all had the same mom too), but if that's what "old school" trucking is, I don't want any part of it.
7 kids I think. Except the two older daughters are gutter sluts & spray babies out of their aquariums every 9 months so there's a shipload of grandkids.