The "ICC" and days of old !

 Most of the old farts like me have passed on and the new drivers have no idea how it was in the early days of trucking, so that lets the "DOT" get away with things that were unheard of back then.

At that time the "DOT" handled road repair and the "ICC" handled trucking. Carriers had to apply for authority to haul between points and publish their rates for shippers to see. Logs were used at that time as a measure of the company's compliance with "ICC" rules to grant them new authority, not like now, to punish drivers for trying to make a better living. I could go into a dissertation on logs at this point, but it would take up the whole post, so I'll leave that for later.

Suffice it to say that trucking was a skilled labor job until the DOT came aboard, [check some of my first post to get an idea of the skill it took to operate the rigs of that era] and the only difference between the pay you got for driving and the pay for working in a warehouse was the fact that you got to work twice as many hours so you made twice the pay, so for guys that didn't care that they didn't have a home life so they could have a bigger pay check, it made sense,

I brought that up because if you listen to "6 days on the road" in my last post, it speaks of the ICC is checking on down the line and I thought it would need explaining that they ran the scales and inspections, not the DOT. Trucking was a lot different then. We were more like the last American cowboy, which some ad agency used that very glorification, for awhile, combined with C. W. McCall's "CONVOY", [see other post], we were "Kings of the road" to many. 

Unfortunately, The very thing that drew everyone's attention to us was our downfall, The "C/B" ! 

Too many fowl mouth miscreants could hide behind the immunity of the radio to make anyone who listened very long, wonder what rock we crawled out from under, until c/b's and trucking became cuss words and caused the luster that we had worked for, to leave the industry forever.

Now we have automatic trans, air ride, air conditioning, cell phones portable tv's and all the comforts of a motor home instead of the spring ride, 2/70 ac [role 2 windows down and drive 70 mph ], 10 to 20 speed manual trans and all the "Good old Days" left behind.