The truck I regularly drove was a Mid-70s era Ford F7000 single axle straight body truck with a 3208 Caterpillar V8 diesel engine, 4-speed transmission with a 2-speed axle and 5-compartment 2000-gallon fuel tank body. The truck had lots of power but top end was 58 miles per hour (MPH). The truck was dual purpose; haul bulk fuel to local gasoline stations and make rural deliveries of fuel and heating oil to farms and homes.
I was essentially hired for the job sight unseen when my wife had heating oil delivered for our house the summer of 1979 (August?) while I was out looking for work. The truck was being driven by a trainee and being supervised by the company owner, Wayne Rogers. Wayne told my wife that this new guy wasn’t working out and that he needed to find a new driver. Wayne then asked my wife if I was related to Donald G. Kempf (my father) and she replied that I was his youngest son. She mentioned I was looking for work and knew how to drive a truck. Wayne told her that if I was anything like my father (who worked for Wayne when he was 16-years old), that I would do fine.
When I arrived home that afternoon Anna told me I had a job offer and to go to Ray’s Lawn and Garden to apply for it. Ray was Wayne’s son-in-law and he ran a John Deere dealership out of the same location as Roger’s Oil. The two businesses were very synergistic. During the summer, the oil company business was slow and the lawn and garden was busy, in the winter the situation was the opposite. The job I was offered was primarily as a truck driver and a small engine mechanic when I wasn't making deliveries. My interview with Ray lasted all of about five minutes before I was hired. I took to the job pretty much like a duck to water and generally it was a happy time. The pay wasn’t great but it was steady work and at the time, work was hard to find.
Most days were just regular events. It is the few days where you come close to talking to God one-on-one that you recall clearly. Roger's was a Marathon wholesale jobber. That meant that they supplied several of the local Marathon service stations with fuel and oil. These deliveries were generally easy and fast trips because you could do a gravity drop into the underground tanks which is very fast. Other deliveries used the truck's engine driven pump and a 1 1/2-inch hose to fill above ground tanks. For a gravity drop, you used a measuring stick to see how much fuel was in the tank to confirm that there was space to add what you were unloading (Having fuel overflow is an expensive mistake at 400 Gallons a minute.) Once you were sure that you had room for the load, you just connected the hose between the truck and the tank then opened the valve to let gravity do all the work.
Two of my most memorable incidents involved deliveries to Butch Furnish’s Marathon in Henryville, Indiana (IN). We made a 2200-gallon delivery there of regular and unleaded gasoline every Monday, Wednesday and Friday (Butch didn’t sell premium). The only variance in the routine was the quantities configured in the tanks. The truck was equipped with 5 tanks. 600, 500, 400 & 2-250 gallon tanks. Nominally, the truck would hold 2000 gallons. But there was air space in these tanks and if I was going on a short trip where heat expansion wasn’t an issue (like a 15-minute drive to Henryville), I could cram an extra 10% into the tanks for a total of 2200-gallons. The good thing about the trip is it was a fast turnaround (about an hour and a half) the bad thing is the truck was heavy and drove like a pig.
After I was given the load request, I'd fill up at the tank dock. This was usually with 1450/750 mix (it varied based on recent sales) and I headed out toward Henryville. The trip was two miles down highway 403 to Speed, IN, then right onto US Highway 31 another nine miles through Memphis, IN, to Henryville. Highway 31 was only two lanes north of Speed and paralleled the ConRail railroad line to the north. A couple miles out of town is Bud Prather road where I had my first close call.
I’d just wound that truck up to top speed (58 MPH) and the tachometer was sitting steady at 2750 RPMs (red-line, top end, against the governor) and I had settled into” the Zone” for a quick cruise down the highway. Hwy 31 was the main road into town so there was a steady flow of daytime 55-MPH traffic coming toward me and an open road in front of me. That was until I spied a Ford Falcon over the tracks coming down Bud Prather road toward me from the right. In southern Indiana, in the early eighties, Falcons were generally driven by little old ladies and this one was no exception. As the car approached the railroad crossing just before the intersection I had a bad feeling that she wasn’t going to stop and that was a prophetic intuition. She was only doing about 20 as she crossed the tracks and then only stopped for a moment before she turned right directly in front of my fast approaching truck.
I quickly assessed my options: A. Slam on the brakes and clobber this car and die in a ball of flames. B. Turn into the oncoming traffic and again die in a ball of flames. C. Try and go around on the gravel shoulder and pray the truck doesn’t roll over and I die in a ball of flames. I opted for plan C and went flying by her slowly accelerating car on the right shoulder with me standing on the brake pedal while being enveloped in a cloud of dust. The truck finally stopped a couple hundred yards past her while I just sat there gasping for breath. Meanwhile, she slowly plodded by me on her way to Memphis like nothing at all unusual had happened. Death was avoided for another day.
The second incident occurred at Butch’s station. It sat at the southwest corner of Hwy 31 and state road 160 in “Downtown” Henryville. The station was also across the street from the Catholic church and next door to the local diner. There were two sets of pumps, one set on the east side between the building and HWY 31 and other on the north side between the building and ST RD 160. The tanks were located underground between the north pumps and the building. I would pull in under the awning next to the pumps and make my drop there. The red, white and blue truck was quite visible from the intersection and I was standing behind the truck with two three-inch hoses extending 15-feet further out behind the truck dumping fuel into tanks.
The next thing I know, an old beat-up farm pickup truck came zooming into the station from SR 160 and finally comes to a stop 3-feet from the back of my truck and straddled one of my drop hoses. I’d had my back turned switching the hose to another tank and opening the valve when I turned around just in time to smack my neoprene covered gloves on the hood of the truck as it stopped. (I had been sure I was going to die crushed between the pickup and my truck.) In an extremely agitated state (I wonder why?) I ran around to the driver and asked him “What the fuck do you think you are doing?????!!!!!” He replied in a slow drawl “Sorry, my brakes aren’t working.” At this point I kinda exploded with profanities and questioned his intelligence at turning in behind a truck that was obviously unloading fuel instead of doing something safe like coasting into the restaurant parking lot from the other side of the pumps. I told him to back up and for God’s sake be careful. Another brush with death avoided.
My last close call was in Sellersburg, the town just south of Speed. Another short trip (two miles) and an easy load of 1000 gallons of super-unleaded gasoline. The tank for this drop was on the side of the building and the one thing I didn’t like was that the vent for this tank came up next to the building and stopped of the overhang instead. The vent should have been free standing somewhere away from the building. This was not a smart design in my humble opinion, but I wasn’t paid for station design and I had a wife and kids to feed. So, there I was, parked a few feet from the building and as the gas goes into the tank, the fumes were vented out and flowed down the stack. (This is before there were vapor recovery systems like they have now.) I’d stand there and watch the fumes as they were heavier than air and made a mirage-like distortion in the air as they drifted down between the truck and the building. This also made me a bit edgy as fumes from fuel are what you have to worry about. Liquid fuel doesn’t burn, it is the fumes and air mix that get you that wonderful explosive combination. An empty fuel truck is a much greater explosion risk than a full one. A full one will just burn. An empty one, full of fumes, that is what you see explode in the movies.
I’d learned to be a bit skittish at this station as you never know when an idiot will show up. My caution was soon justified as this clown comes out of the station office with a lit cigarette in hand and starts to walk in my direction. I let him get about two steps out the door and two steps from me before I firmly told him that if he took another step toward me I’d tell him what hit him when he woke up. This accomplished my mission as he stopped and stepped back a step while I patiently explained to him the explosive characteristics of the situation and that I had no intention of letting him kill me today. He was pissed but wasn’t inclined to argue with a even more pissed six-foot three truck driver and walked the other direction.
Sometimes, my boss made some decisions that I questioned. Ray had been in the business years and he knew every customer and could tell you the most minute detail of how to make the delivery. For example, a 72-foot mobile home back in a hollow north of Borden, IN. You turned into a driveway that descended into a creek bed. You then drove through the creek around three bends (Each bend you tilted outward and I had a great fear of rolling the truck then finally you would rise up and out of the creek and then there was a small turnaround area. Once you turned around, you would back up to the very edge of a small bridge and from that point you would drag 175 feet of hose (essentially all the hose you had) to the fuel oil tank at the far end of the trailer. I don’t know who hauled that mobile home back onto that property, but I’d like to give him a medal. That wasn’t a dangerous delivery so much as just a frightening one to drive.
One day, I was making a delivery to a marina near Bethlehem, IN, and my next delivery was in New Washington, IN. Rather than back track out to the highway and drive into town, Ray gave me directions for the back way via Flint Ridge road. The short cut would save me 15 miles. The one minor detail that Ray omitted was the 2-ton, cross at your own risk, bridge on that road. The bridge was located at the bottom of a steep hill and the descent is a fairly narrow and curvy two-lane blacktop going down a heavily wooded hill. At the bottom of the hill is a 60-foot deep chasm and this turn-of-the-century truss bridge and a rather large sign warning of no heavy loads.
I figured I was sitting there at about 24,000 lbs., only six times the limit. So again, I weighed my odds for survival: A. Try my luck and back up that long steep and curvy wooded hill and get rear-ended by some teenage farm boy flying around the back roads he knows by heart. B. Take my chances of dying in flames riding the truck falling rear-end first, down into the chasm and then get crushed by the bridge debris. I opted to follow Ray’s directions and cross the bridge. Hoping to increase my chances of survival, I backed up as far as I felt I could to line up a straight shot at the bridge. I did my best speed shifting to reach the low side of third as the front wheels reached the bridge. I assume the bridge was still standing after I crossed as I never looked back to check.
When I returned to the shop, I gave Ray a piece of my mind and flat out told him to never leave out minor details about any more shortcuts or I’d quit.
I worked for Roger’s/Ray’s until New Year’s 1982 when I was laid off due to the poor economy. The timing was fortuitous as I’d been selected by my National Guard unit for attendance of the Quartermaster Officer Basic course (Supply Officer in layman’s terms) in Fort Lee, Virginia, starting the end of January. That was a four-month course that kept me employed through May.
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