Re: Empty returns typical for some truckers, too ...

Hi, Casey -

Driving loads of citrus from Ventura County packing houses to Long Beach Harbor from the
summer and early fall of 1975 through the summer of 1981 I don't recall EVER having a load
on the return trip.  We would usually drop the loaded trailer and pick up an empty, then head
to another packing house and usually load the trailer ourselves using battery-powered pallet
jacks or sometimes - if we were lucky - just swap the empty trailer for a loaded one and make
a second trip to Long Beach before returning to the yard.

Here's part of the lineup of under-powered old clunkers we drove out of the Fillmore & Western's terminus of Santa Paula - they made all of ten or twelve mph up the Conejo grade out of Camarillo - and a shot of my unofficial foster brother John Hall loading a pallet of lemons or oranges headed eventually to Europe or Japan.*


I was in the mid-teens on the seniority list, so usually I didn't get my first call of the week until late Tuesday afternoon, then - with my ten hour day followed by someone else using the same truck for the next ten hours - I'd get called again early Wednesday afternoon, then late morning on Thursday and early morning on Friday.  Sometimes during the peak of the season in July and August we "extra board" guys would get called before dawn on Saturday for a single turn to Long Beach.   Adding a twenty-minute commute to both ends of the schedule didn't leave much time for eating or sleeping, much less any social life except MAYBE on Saturday evening and Sunday, but I made enough money in the summer to go back to college the rest of the year, with only an occasional job as a substitute teacher and side job as a surveyor's assistant to help me get by.

- Roosso

* John and I also worked occasionally as locomotives and fork-lifts on the Pitting Shed, Drying Yard & Pacific two-foot gauge railway in the nearby Upper Ojai Valley - see [ngdiscussion.net] and [ngdiscussion.net].