My 5th birthday I had a Winnie the Pooh cake. My 6th birthday, 1979, I had a “10-4 Good Buddy!” replete with CB and cord that wrapped around the top of the sheet cake.
Side note (not a hijack) I remember the fad of CB’s gave way to the fad of TRS-80’s. In fact, I asked the first TRS-80 owner I knew of, when I saw his bodacious 4K machine, “What’s the matter, Lester, were they out of CB radios at The Shack?”
I remember someone broadcasting this a couple of times:
Double nickels day and night
Smokey Bear Will not bite
When the normally rotten Seattle traffic is especially bad, I wish I had a CB radio so I can ask the truckers what’s going on ahead. (Or just listen and know.)
ugh Teddy Bear. Always my vote for The Most Maudlin Song In The Universe.
This. It was the ur-Internet.
Quite possible the funniest, and wrongest (if that’s not a word, I’m coining it now.) CB song.
Rod Hart’s C.B. Savage.
Oh my.
Weird. You interpreted [Too Many Cats] post way different than I did. I didn’t see it as a dig against truckers at all. I agree with you that the truckers used their CBs for all of the reasons you mentioned. But for truckers CBs weren’t a ‘craze’. I interpreted [Too Many Cats] post as poking fun at the craze that took over the non-trucking nation. It was like they forced their selves into a culture that wasn’t theirs to share. I agree with him when he says: “the CB/Trucker craze was intensely stupid.” It wasn’t a craze and it was stupid to truckers. It was a craze and intensely stupid for a soccer mom to get a CB and a handle. Just like it’s a craze and intensely stupid for about a million other fads that have come and gone like saggy pants, tamagachis (sp?), pet rocks, disco, swing dancing, mood rings, black/strobe lights, leisure suits, blue jean suits, 2 day beard growth, on and on and on (When will the saggy pants around the ass go away?)
Yeah, I had all my eight-tracks by my side from Dolly Parton to Charley Pride.
My stereo a-rattlin’ on the dash with Johnny Cash and all that good trash.
Yeah, culture with a side order of grits!
– The White Knite, Cledus Maggard & the Citizen’s Band
(Not being a Country music fan when I was a kid, I thought it was Charlie Parton. At least I knew who Johnny Cash was. He had a TV show.)
All of them? How? Who would be writing down their license plate numbers? And even if somebody did, do you think law enforcement has nothing better to do than the follow dozens of truckers hundreds of miles each, to their respective destinations, to cite them for speeding violations and a few unpaid tolls?
Sakes alive, good buddy, that’s the point of a convoy. Safety in numbers.
The most romanticized truckers were independents, owning their own rigs and arranging their own delivery contracts. The energy crisis and the 55-mile-an-hour speed limit hit these guys hard. They were facing a huge increase in costs and didn’t have the leverage to pass it on to their customers. Their way of life was in jeopardy, much like when cowboys were fenced in by barbed wire. And people kind of responded to that.
Remember Claude Akins in *Movin’ On*? And the Merle Haggard theme song? Ah, them was good times.
My understanding is that truckers were folk heroes of sorts at that time because of their well publicized union activity (with Jimmy Hoffa)
It also helped that the C.W. McCall character was originally developed as the spokesperson for Old Home bread ads and had already had another trucking related hit with “Old Home Fill’er up and Keep-on-a-trucking café”, so people were getting exposure to the lifestyle even in their normal lives.
… and this was the same culture that elected Jimmy Carter president… :smack:
“Big wheels rollin’…
Big wheels rollin’, movin’ on…”
Oh, yeah, I remember it. Funny thing is, about a year ago I found it on one of those off-off brand TV stations (like COZI or one of those) and was excited to watch a show that I used to love when I was ten.
It was…pretty bad, but no worse than the usual hour-long '70s fare.
My mother had a crush on Claude Akins. I could never quite figure that one out.
Don’t forget-it wasn’t just Convoy the song. It was Convoy the movie. And White Line Fever. And the aforementioned Movin On. And Steel Cowboy. There was an episode of McCloud featuring truckers. Everyone wanted in on that trucker action.
Plus the CB craze hit other movies as an incidental feature. Kids in your average 70s teen romp used CBs.
And I have to add that Wolf Creek Pass is the superior CW McCall trucker song. The imagery is better, and the song makes more sense.
The sign said clearance to the 12 foot line
But them chickens was stacked to thirteen-nine
We shot that tunnel at a hundred and ten
Like gas through a funnel and eggs through a hen
We took that top row of chickens off
slicker than scum off a Louisiana swamp
Nah. The Teamsters were widely regarded as corrupt, and Hoffa was gone by the time of the CB craze. The most romanticized truckers, the independent owner-operators, were to some degree rivals of the Teamsters.
Good old Mavis. I love that song.
Here’s the original Old Home commercial, for those who haven’t seen it.
Proto-C.W.! “Convoy” grew out of this (as, obviously, did “Old Home Fill ‘er Up and Keep on a Truckin’ Cafe”)
I never thought of it that way, but you’re right. C.W. McCall was the white Gil Scott-Heron!
I don’t quite understand “forced their selves [sic] into a culture that wasn’t theirs to share.” All artifacts of culture take on a life of their own. Sometimes for good, sometimes for ill, usually a combination of the two. I’m not seeing an qualitative equivalence between the nature of CB radio and all the other fads you derisively list.
Were non-truckers who got home CBs and talked to truckers on the road “stupid to truckers”? No doubt in some cases, they were. But I personally know of families who invested whole-hog into this phenomenon, were completely sincere in what they did, and were more than just bandwagon-jumpers. They seemed to get a lot out of it.
I would guess at least some percentage of truckers did too. Those who didn’t had a simple remedy…tune out/refuse to respond to people they didn’t care to, and switch to another of the 20+ channels available.
In the end, the way it all came down was dependent on the quality of the people on either end of the microphone…just like in real life.
Note that MAD magazine made a point of ignoring CB radios every month.
My problem was the “progression” from “little” convoy to “great big” to “mighty”.
May as well link to that one, which for some reason my parents loved and I basically memorized b/c the 45 was played so much. Man, that takes me back.
Thanks so much for finding that - it was played endlessly in my state (South Dakota) as a point of pride almost. There are even some sequel commercials I believe.
Recall too that Steven Speilberg’s TV movie Duel came out just before that time (1971).
I almost mentioned this, too. We had a car Like Weaver’s at that time.