Cloyce TV

Me Pops had an old friend growing up, I'll call him Cloyce just to give him a name, who spent part of his adult life as an over the road trucker. Cloyce liked the job, other than one particular day.

Generally, Cloyce didn't haul one load of one given item. His truck trailers would be filled with all sorts of miscellaneous flotsam and jetsam destined for someplace other than where they began. He merely picked up a trailer, drove it to terminal, and was given another trailer for the flip flop. Easy peasy.

But one day he was given a load which was nothing but brand new RCA color console TVs. You know, those wooden behemoths which were the centerpiece of most of our dens and living rooms in the Sixties and Seventies. The retail cost of the load was around $60,000, not chump change today but a much heftier sum in 1967.

Cloyce found he was scared to death the whole time he had that trailer full of television sets. "Bill, there's people out there who hijack trucks when they know such valuable things take up the whole trailer, " Cloyce was explaining to me Pops. "They'll kill you over that!"

It wasn't too much later that Cloyce found another job. He didn't want to get another haul like that.