Jen of All Trades and Master of None

'The Father Of Motor Truck Transportation' Ted V. Rodgers Unified A Fractured Industry, Giving Birth To Its Prosperity By Jennifer Botchie ATA Web Editor Ted V. Rodgers April 7, 1888 - Sept. 13, 1960 ATA President, 1933-47 A bronze plaque in the lobby of the American Trucking Associations headquarters in Alexandria, Va., honors Ted V. Rodgers, the associations' first president, calling him "the father of motor truck transportation." By all accounts, that description is not much of a stretch, as Rodgers has been frequently described as someone who almost single-handedly united what was a fragmented industry in the 1930s. Starting with his tenure as president of the Pennsylvania Motor Truck Association and continuing as ATA's leader, Rodgers was not afraid to travel extensively and use his persuasive powers to ally di...

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...