Nostalgia and resurrecting old writing

Yesterday, my Facebook memories informed me that July 2020 marks 20 years since I started working at the American Trucking Associations. As I said there, it's hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that that job was almost half a lifetime ago. Twenty-five years since my high school graduation, or 20 years since my college graduation, don't seem quite so strange, but for some reason this does. Maybe because it was the first post-college job for which I had to leave my hometown and thus marked the real beginning of my "grown-up" life.

I started as an assistant web editor with Transport Topics, the weekly newspaper. I had to write the A.M. and P.M. Executive Briefings for the web and e-newsletters, which basically meant I trolled through the news all day, looking for items of interest to the trucking industry. I had a My Yahoo page (!) set up to cull through trucking, transportation and other related headlines. It wasn't a bad gig, but I also had to sit at the front desk, and often got interrupted by people thinking I was the receptionist.

I also got to go to San Diego to write the daily briefings from ATA's Management Conference and Exhibition. That was an adventure -- the flights on both ends were delayed/changed (although that did result in one brief first-class flight AND a three-hour whirlwind tour of Vegas), plus I had to be up waaaaaay early to get the briefings ready and written for East Coast time.

After about six months, the state reporter left, and I was offered that job. I'll only say that because of that gig, I can say I had a brief stint as a "Capitol Hill reporter" -- because I had to go cover Elaine Chao's first confirmation hearing, when she became Secretary of Labor under President George W. Bush (Ergonomics had become part of my beat, and I had to cover the hearing to see if they discussed ergonomics at all -- and if I remember correctly, they didn't really).

And after about six months or so of THAT, I moved over to ATA's Internet Services department as a web content editor. That was probably the best job I ever had (full-time, at least). I worked with good people, I had an editor who actually served as a mentor to me and took the time to teach me, and I liked the work I did.

There was one massive project that leads to this blog post: Trucking's Trailblazers, a series of profiles of the past chairmen of ATA. I worked on those in 2001-02, so keep in mind that Google wasn't quite so powerful. ATA also didn't really have much of an institutional memory, so I relied on the Transport Topics archives and a book a former ATA exec had written that had brief profiles of most of the past chairmen. And Lexis-Nexis -- we had a subscription to that, and I pored through it. I chased down every lead I possibly could for chairmen dating back to the 1930s. I dug up web sites with homages to now-defunct trucking companies and old, old minor league baseball teams.

But in one of my other infinitesimal moments of journalistic glory, I also got to interview Bob Dole and Dean Smith by phone. Russ Williams, who was ATA president in 1956-7, was Dole's first law client. Lee Shaffer, who was at the helm in 1999-2000, was a former UNC Tar Heel basketball player -- though Smith was "only" an assistant when he played. But I had a friend working in UNC sports information at the time, so not only was I able to wrangle the interview, I also got some quality photos of Shaffer in action to go with the story.

I wrote almost 56 of these (my managing editor took a turn at a few of them). They were supposed to live on ad infinitum, and be updated each year as another chairman passed the gavel. However, I left ATA in 2004 as they were gearing up for a major site redesign, and the series never migrated over.

Here it is, in all its early-2000s
stylistic glory, broken links and all.

Thanks to a lot of digging through the Internet Wayback Machine, I was able to find them in something of their former glory. The text is there, but most of the art is not. It kind of kills me that after all that work, they didn't live on ATA's web site for very long. I'd like to be able to point people to a link that looks nice and use those as clips. I was still young and my writing was a bit raw, but I did have a good editor.

So, midst my waves of nostalgia, I've decided to scrape the text and archive the profiles here. At one point, I might also go dig out the "Alternate Route" columns I wrote as well -- blogging before it was called blogging, about oddball news related to trucking. It was fun.

Since the Trailblazers were originally posted on Thursdays, and, well, #throwbackthursday is a thing, I think I'll try to post one profile each Thursday til I have them all here. I'm not sure if that's violating copyrights or anything like that, so I'll be sure to credit ATA on each one and even link back to the Internet Archive. If you have any insight on that, please let me know in the comments or drop me an email.

Check back next Thursday for the first Trailblazer: Ted V. Rodgers, "The Father of Motor Truck Transportation."