Unfortunately, no photos of my grandparents' rigs survived in any of the family albums I've seen. Their trucks were just "tools of the trade", which included delivering ice and coal, trucking dynamite to coal mines in east Tennessee and Kentucky, and hauling gravel with a dump truck they purchased new when Sewart Air Force Base was being built in Smyrna Tennessee prior to WW II. The dump truck ran 24/7, with two drivers working 12-hour shifts each. The gravel bed for the concrete runway was 4 feet thick to carry the weight of the bombers they expected to be based there.
In the mid-1930's depression days when "there were no jobs available", those folks kept their entire neighborhood employed- - - -at least the ones who weren't "earning" $2.00 a day leaning on a shovel for the WPA! They paid $4.00 for shoveling out a gondola car load of coal, which was about a 12-hour job, and it was not uncommon to have several carloads waiting to be unloaded, even at a pay rate that amounted to twice "minimum wage"! When the coal delivery business slowed down in the summertime, my grandfather would buy huge piles of sawmill slabs and keep his delivery drivers busy cutting them up into cookstove-sized fuel sticks that they sold along with their coal. Delivering ice from the plant they also owned was a year-round thing, as only the very rich could afford refrigerators- - - -most people had ice boxes that had to be refilled a couple of times a week, at least. My grandmother kept a pack of cigarettes in the coal yard office, although she never smoked- - - -selling them to her employees for a penny apiece if they couldn't afford a whole 15-cent pack. That was a nickel a pack profit, so every fourth one she bought was free! I have a feeling today's pampered snowflakes who refuse to take menial jobs would have starved to death back then!
Jerry
