When Truckers Ruled the Earth

I, for one, think the highways were much safer when patrolled by uniformed bears.

The Dig: Day 3
Artifact: 15 cards of the 44-card Donruss “CB Convoy Code” series
Dated: 1977-78 (bread-borne)

These sticker cards trigger a convoy of memories.

First, though I had totally forgotten that collectible cards once came in loaves of bread, on finding these, I immediately recalled the “bready” smell of the cards and searching through the clear plastic areas of a loaf trying to figure out which card was in the package. (There were more than just the CB slang series—this blog shows a few examples of why I was feeling up innocent loaves of bread on the supermarket aisle.)

The Family Burgin operated right smack dab in the middle of the CB craze. (Here’s a link that nicely encapsulates it for the post-’70s readers out there.)

Each sticker came with a list of soon-to-be-dead slang on the back!

There was the one used mainly on our trips to different Appaloosa horse shows throughout the Southeast. (I was a horse show urchin, though I neither rode nor showed—think Oliver Twist minus Fagan and the phat begging skilz.) We also had a home-based CB—big, black, square and in the kitchen. We lived within a mile of I-40, so it was easy to tap into the stream of trucker communication driving between Nashville and Knoxville (and beyond). I wish I could report hilarious pranks played on passing motorists, or even some scary tale of narrowly avoided trucker vengeance. (After all, there’s no vengeance like trucker vengeance.) But I was just an unprecocious 10-year-old; the unsuspecting truckers drove in and out of range untested by my wiles.

Briefly, there was a third CB in the Burgin household—the unwanted, disputed fruit of a second place finish that I won in sixth grade. Or rather, my Mom won it by helping me place second in the selling of popcorn for my school. That year, 1979, would signal the end of pre-packaged, unpopped popcorn’s dominance in the lucrative Catholic elementary school market, as the instantly ubiquitous World’s Finest Chocolate syndicate would take over the very next year. (In turn, the WFC would reign unchallenged for a few decades before its market hegemony was forever shattered. The school fundraising landscape is now littered with a hodgepodge of chocolate bars, holiday cards/gifts, popcorn, magazine subscriptions and the like.) But in 1979, it was still all about the ’corn for St. Edward and its prepubescent Saints.

The winning of that CB radio left a lasting impression. Not because I tapped still nascent levels of industry and salesmanship (again, all Mom—thank you, Mom), but because the original prize for second place was a bicycle—the CB radio was the grand prize. Unfortunately for this sixth-grade bicycle enthusiast, the winner of the popcorn sales event was a chubby, red-headed fourth grade girl. Not surprisingly, she didn’t want a CB radio. In a staggering setback that I’m convinced still haunts the women’s rights movement to this day, it was even suggested such a prize was inappropriate for a girl. (But somehow a device mainly used by hefty, lonely, middle-aged men with miles to go before they slept? That was just the thing for a 6th grade boy.)

Having a new bike—one rightfully earned for me by my mother’s toil—snatched from me in such a manner was Lesson #23 (of 4,570 and counting) in Life’s Not Fair class. The CB radio was sold to a friend of my Dad’s for $5. So basically, my mom worked her butt off, a fourth grader got a bike, I got $5, and the St. Edward Saints met their fundraising goals for 1979/1980 calendar year.

Sorry, Mom.