For three years of my life (1978-1981) I worked for RAM Industries, an insulation sub-contractor in southern Indiana. At the beginning, I thought that I might be working for a company that was going somewhere. That somewhere ended up a dead-end road but that is another story. But first, a bit of background.
RAM Industries was the brainchild of Richard Antonio Madonia (You can see where the RAM came from). When I first started there, the company was headquartered in a shack, in a warehouse complex in Clarksville, Indiana. I was hired as an insulation installer and for the next three years of my life I itched. Fiberglass is not a fun product to play with and if you work with it any period of your life, you become accustomed to itching.
Over the years I worked there, I started as an installer then I took over the warehouse and eventually I also inherited driving the semi-tractor trailer we used to make deliveries to General Electric Appliance park off of Newburg Road in Louisville, Kentucky. When I started, RAM was a growing concern. They had just bought out a competitor, Lyon Insulation and they were quickly becoming one of the largest insulation contractors in the Louisville area. They secured contracts with Crest Communities and Ryan builders and RAM was growing. Rick was a forward thinker and a great salesman. One of the things he wanted to do was eliminate his dependence on Owens Corning for blown in fiberglass. So, he created a new sub-corporation making his own blown in fiberglass and called it RAMs Wool.
This operation utilized scrap insulation bought from General Electric (GE) from their recycling operation and hence this was our initial contact with GE. From there, Rick quickly created another sub-corporation and Thermacoustics was born. About the same time, RAM moved from Clarksville, to Bennettsville where Rick had bought an abandoned warehouse, conveniently across the street from my house. Thermacoustics made die cut fiberglass parts and our main contract was with GE making the sound wrap for dishwashers. This is where the Semi-Truck and I come together.
The semi-tractor was a well-used 1971 International Fleetstar. The Fleetstar design was tried and true old school conventional design that had been essentially unchanged from the 50s. This truck was no prize and its main desirable feature for RAM besides being cheap, old and worn out, like all the other RAM trucks, was that it had a gasoline engine. Its transmission was a four-speed with a two-speed axle (No ten-speed road ranger like most tractors) and while it had tandem axles, the second axle was a “dead-axle” (no drive) and air suspension. This truck was old and tired and if we had been hauling cargo that weighed anything, it would not have lasted a couple weeks. To make this tractor look good in comparison, RAM also bought a pair of Strick 40-foot trailers. These were rejects from a scrap yard and looked like it. It took a lot of work and engineering to just get the lights to minimally work and again since we carried no load of any weight, the trailer brakes were not a major concern.
Three days a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I got up about 3 AM and made an early morning delivery to GE. Technically, the doors to Building 3, where I delivered, opened at 6 AM. These were the outer doors to docking bays at building three. Six docking bays with outer and inner doors. You opened the outer door, then backed your trailer into a 90-foot-deep bay up to the dock, where there was a second inner door. Once at the dock, you closed the outer door and waited for the first shift to start at 7:30. Trucks were unloaded in the order of arrival so it was best to get there at 6, and that is what I did. At 7:30, the inner doors opened and if you were lucky, someone would condescend to start to unload you by 8 or 8:30. On the average, I was getting out of the plant somewhere after 9. One of the other advantages of the early arrival and the slow unload was I generally missed the seven to nine AM morning rush hour.
This day began normally in every way. The trailer had been loaded the day before and I’d already fueled it and had it parked ready to go. By 4:30 I was at work and on the road by 5. I arrived at Appliance Park, building three at 6 and backed into Bay 1, closed the door to the bay and climbed into the cab for a nap. Back up at 7:30 and we had the 3,000-pound load (The trailer was cubed out top to bottom, front to back, the load just weighed nearly zero.) unloaded by 9 or so. Now for a quick trip back to the warehouse empty.
The route back was simple. Newburg Road north to the Watterson Expressway, West on the Watterson maybe a quarter-mile then the on ramp to Interstate 65 north. This ramp looped around the Kentucky Fair and Exposition Center as it merged into three northbound lanes. The interstate then turned to the right and up an overpass crossing Eastern Parkway before heading downtown. Eastern Parkway was also landmarked by the Ralston Purina grain silos that were adjacent to I-65.
I could usually manage to wind out this poor tired truck by the end of the ramp and somewhere between 55 and 58 MPH was top end. I made the lazy right turn and I climbed over the rise of the Eastern Parkway overpass in the center lane to be greeted by a sea of red brake lights.
The entire highway was at a complete stop. I slammed on the brakes and went for the slide of my life in a cloud of blue-gray tire smoke. It was fortunate that the center lane was clearer and I was going between cars stopped in the inner and outer lanes. I look ahead and I see myself closing way too fast, bearing down on a light blue 1978 Mercury Monarch with a white half vinyl roof. I had my entire 6-foot plus frame bearing down on the air brakes in the five-and-a-half-foot cab praying that I wouldn’t kill anyone in the wreck. The trailer started to jackknife to the left and I gently turned into the skid as I watched the distance close on the Mercury. Time seemed to slow as 16 tires were squalling and I was still trying to figure out how I had gotten into such a mess.
Finally, I came to a stop. It was a miracle! I looked over the nose of the tractor and all I could see the front half of the roof and the hood of the Mercury. I couldn’t have missed the bumper by more than a few inches. Then all the smoke and burning rubber smell, enveloped us, adding to the flavor of the situation. I also have always wondered what the driver of the Mercury thought about when he heard the noise and looked to see the huge grill of that red International truck bearing down on him shrouded in a cloud of blue smoke. I’m sure he was soiling his pants, I know I was. Eventually, the traffic cleared and I managed to get back to Bennettsville without any further incident.
It was only a few weeks later that I had learned of the precarious financial situation of RAM and all the other sub-businesses when GE stopped production at Building three for about a year. RAM quickly closed down after there were no more GE deliveries. Rick had mortgaged the business to tool up for GE and had no contingency for the sudden end of the contract. Thus, my time with RAM had come to an end.
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