When you go to one of the Tow Shows, they usually have some kind of recovery display--a truck on its top, and a big rig pulls it back onto its wheels.  A good way to show off the equipment, but I can't imagine how violence does not somehow erupt.  You can be out in the woods somewhere, miles from nowhere, doing a recovery, and some yahoo will walk up and tell you what you're doing wrong.  THAT is the REAL miracle of the Tow Show recovery displays.  You've got hundreds of "experts" walking around, many of them with a beer in hand, you've got a major city street blocked off, and somehow a fistfight (or worse) does not break out in the middle of the gig.  You would think that everyone and their dog would be hollering out advice, telling the guy next to them how they did the same thing with a 2-ton snatch block, some twine, and a golf cart.

The most improbable recovery I was a part of was early in my towing career, at an urban impound company that had 2 pickup-bed sling trucks with Holmes 220 Electric units in the back.  Unfortunately, there were forested areas within the city and county limits, so occasionally we got some nasty recovery just a few miles from the urban center.  Usually we'd sent one of the medium-duty or heavy-duty wreckers up, but one day we got a Stolen Recovery that someone had driven out a spur road along some power lines and then pushed over the edge down about a hundred feet into the clearcut cleared for the power lines.  The spur road was too narrow and overgrown for the medium-duty, so my boss (my brother-in-law, at the time) and I headed up there with one of the Holmes 220s.

We had enough cable, but the incline was very steep, so that electric winch was having a lot of trouble pulling the half-ton pickup with oversize tires back up the hill.  My brother-in-law went down the hill and stayed with the truck, because one of the main problems we were having was with stumps.  They were all over the place, and tying the steering off wasn't working well.  We needed to maneuver the truck around and through the stumps.  So he would turn the steering wheel of the truck as needed while I ran the winch.  It was very slow going.  I'd have to rev the motor on the wrecker to get enough pulling power to move the pickup at all.

Finally, we got the pickup wedged between two stumps and my brother-in-law couldn't get the steering wheel to turn the way he wanted.  He pulled so hard on it that he broke the steering.  Now we were in real trouble.  No way to control the steering of the pickup as we winched it up the hill.  We called for a second truck.  There was a dual-winch Holmes 440 in the fleet, and we asked for that, but instead they sent the other 220.  My brother-in-law called the driver on the radio and asked him to bring a 6-pack.  It was a hot day, and we'd been up there about 2 hours already.  When the driver showed up with Pepsi, I thought my brother-in-law was going to punch him.

While we were waiting for the second truck, he had gone back down the hill and chopped most of one of the stumps out of the way with a Dollie Activator Bar.  Unbelievable.

We lined the two wreckers up side-by-side, ran both cables to the pickup, and alternately ran the winches.  The first truck was having real trouble, we had worked it so hard that when it died, the battery was dead, and we had to jump-start it with the other truck.  Both winches were smoking.  We would pull one truck, throttled up, until the front wheels came about 4 feet off the ground, then we'd pull with the other one till the first one went down and that one went up.  Then a police officer drove his cruiser down to see how we were doing and got stuck trying to back out.  We really didn't want to unhook either truck, so my brother-in-law asked if he could try getting it unstuck.  The officer was very reluctant, and I think he acquiesced simply to prove my brother-in-law couldn't get it out.  The road went down a ridge, so rather than trying to get turned around, my brother-in-law just gunned it downhill to get out of the muddy spot, and then took off down the road, which we had no idea where it went or what was down there.  The officer looked very concerned.  A few minutes later he came back up the road, fishtailing and throwing mud everywhere, right past us and up to the main road.  The officer started hiking up the muddy trail.

It was 6 hours from start to finish to get that pickup out and to the main road.   Other than the broken steering, it wasn't too much the worse for wear.  The wreckers looked a lot worse, mud everywhere, inside and out, cables and chains in disarray.  Those old V8 gas motors had worked extremely hard, and how those electric winches kept working through that much stress and extreme overuse is beyond me.  Later that night, at my sister and brother-in-law's house, we enjoyed the 6-pack of our choice.

Have a safe and profitable week.

Sincerely,
Nick Kemper
www.TowPartsNow.com

At a customer's facility today, looking at a wrecked tow truck, and a gaze at the truck's interior reminded me of why I got out of managing tow truck drivers.  You would think that if you spend 8-18 hours a day in your workspace, you would want that workspace to look, feel, and smell as good as possible.  Some drivers take great pride in their assigned truck, keeping the outside and inside clean and professional-looking.  Some drivers... don't.  A good way to know how someone is going to take care of your equipment is to take a look at their personal vehicle.  Doing that sometimes made me cry.

At one point in my managing days, I resorted to monthly truck inspections.  At first, I scheduled them and told the driver when I was going to do the inspection.  This worked most of the time.  For at least one day every month, that truck was in good shape.  After several months, I made the inspections surprise inspections.  Wow, you've never heard such grumbling.  Inspection scores were figured into performance evaluations, so they were sensitive to this new concept of work performance actually having a direct effect on their compensation.  Crazy idea, I know.

 There was a good deal of competition between drivers to see who could get the highest score, or even a perfect score.  I think I only gave out one perfect score during the program, which lasted a year or so.  It was hard to sustain, doing 14 surprise inspections per month, especially in winter. 

My goal with tow truck cleanliness was not a perfect score on a surprise inspection, but just a general professional look and smell, and a tidiness, every day.  If you wouldn't want your mom to get in that truck, then that was a problem, because a lot of customers are someone's mom.  I don’t need to do the white-glove test.  I don’t need to feel Armor-All on the seat.  Those hard-to-reach spots between the bed and the cab don’t need to be polished, but every once in awhile you have to finish off an old wash mitt by reaching in there to wipe away the outer layer of grime.

 You have to appreciate the scars and marks that accumulate on a piece of equipment that’s been in circulation a long time.  I’m not talking about broken windshields or crushed fenders, but there really shouldn’t be new paint on your wheellift.  The bed and butt-plate should have a few scratches.  What you want are trucks that work, in more than one sense of the word.  And a truck like that deserves respect.  It can get dirty, muddy, whatever.  But when the day is done, it needs a little love.

 One of the tricky parts of getting your drivers to take care of their equipment is the simple dichotomy that applies to all aspects of your business.  They don’t own the truck. You do.  They don’t own the office space they’re working in, or the dollar passing through their hands from your customer to you.  If they don’t own it, they won’t care as much about it as you do.  Plain and simple.  The best thing you can do, the only thing you can do… is to put it in their interest.  What’s the definition of “put it in their interest?”  Could be a lot of things:  incentives, intimidation, freedom.  That’s your job:  to figure out what interests each one of your employees.  That’s one reason why no one said it would be easy.  And accept that your employee will not care as much as your truck, your money, your business as you do.  Why should they?

A customer called me recently, pricing out a Fork Holder.  Seems he had lost one.  He called back a short while later to tell me he found it… in the ditch.  Not sure if it fell off while he was driving, or if he was working a recovery, but he found it, after a short search.

My experience is things are lost only temporarily.  I have many stories of losing or misplacing something, only to have it return later. I don’t even worry now when I do lose something of value.  It always seems to find its way back to me.  

One year, while elk hunting, I leaned my rifle against the truck tire, and later backed up and drove away.  I had been parked at the end of an old spur road that you could barely drive on. Not more than two hours later, a family member called for me over the CB, to ask if I had my rifle.  Someone I knew had driven out this same spur road, found the rifle, recognized it, and then ran into one of my family members out on the main road.  Hunting seems to be one activity that lends itself to me losing stuff and later finding it. I’ve found lost gloves, knives, had a lost gun belt returned to me, and last year my daughter lost her tag, license, and Hunter Safety Card, and we found them the next day on a trail we’d followed that day.

Years ago, before cell phones, tow truck drivers carried message pagers, and before that, beepers.  One late night I was sent up into the Forest Park west of Portland to meet a County Sheriff, who had found a stolen vehicle. He walked me out an old blocked-off road to this car, which was complete, but there was no way to drive to the vehicle.  The Sheriff has this idea that I could winch it downhill through the forest to the main road, which was about 500  yards. I had 150 feet of cable on my truck. He made me unspool it to prove I couldn’t do it, so I free-spooled through trees in the dark until it was all the way out, which was really silly because he just left me there and told me it was my problem.  I needed to make sure the car was impounded.

After I re-wound my cable, I left the scene, figuring we’d come back the next day with cable extensions and a
chainsaw.  I was halfway back to the shop when I realized I didn’t have my (bleeping) beeper. The forests here in Western Oregon tend to be thick, with a lot of underbrush.  At least it wasn’t raining.  I drove back up there, and fortunately I had the assistance of sound. I had the dispatcher set off the beeper until I found it.  I hadn’t particularly enjoyed being out in the dark forest the first time.  This time it was even creepier, with the faint sound of beeping getting slowly louder.  After about ten minutes I found it in the dead leaves.

My family gets irritated with me at home when there is a search for a misplaced item, because I confidently join the search, repeating the mantra, “I easily and effortlessly find the (lost item).” The idea is that if you walk around saying, “I can’t find my keys,” then your subconscious makes sure you’re right. I’m not saying my technique works best. I’m just saying I almost always find whatever we’re looking for first.  And I’m not unusually perceptive.  I think that’s what really bugs them about it.

So try it, if you’re ever in a ditch looking for a Fork Holder, or something like that.

Have a safe and profitable week.
 Sincerely,
Nick Kemper


www.TowPartsNow.com

For those of you in the towing industry, do you remember your first experience driving a tow truck?  I do.  I was 15, and I was with my brother-in-law, one of two drivers (the other was my older brother Mike) at McMinnville Towing, the company my parents owned.  We were at the parts store, and he said, "You drive back to the lot."  It was an old Ford 1-ton 4-speed, and it wasn't just the first time driving a tow truck, it was the first time driving a stick shift.  It wasn't pretty.  After backing out of the space, I was having a hard time going forward without killing the engine.  The tow sling was edging farther out into the street every time I rolled slightly backward and tried to depress the  accelerator pedal in conjunction with releasing the clutch.  I have to hand it to my brother-in-law, though.  He calmly turned on the rotator lights so no one would run into us, and he had me keep trying till I got it.

One of the benefits of being in a tow truck and not a car.

The first vehicle I owned was a 1949 Willys Jeep with a Chevy 283 in it, painted camo.  My 8-year-old just the other day asked me what happened to it, because I've told him about it a few times.  "I traded it for a '69 LeMans," I told him.

"What's that."

"A car with a nose longer than the Honda I'm driving now."

"You shoulda kept the jeep," he said.

Duh.  Like I don't know that now.  I crashed the LeMans into a tree a year after I got it.  The Willys couldn't go 95 mph, so I doubt it would have met the same end.

My parents sold the tow company before I was old enough to drive legally for them, so my first real driving experience was when I was 20, for a company named Estby Towing in Beaverton, Oregon, where my brother-in-law was now managing.  His brother Leonard was my trainer. Leonard and I had known each other for years, so learning from him was easy.  I was assigned to a Chevy 1-ton with a 454 and a Vulcan Cradle Snatcher.  Wow, what fun! Like dollying a car every time you hook up.  And try keeping those extension chains
away from the side of a Suburban.  We would tie shop rags around the clevis hook at the top of the extension chain so that it was a scuff rather than a scratch.

Leonard did a good job of training me, I have to admit.  In the 20 years I was behind the wheel  accidents and damage claims were few and far between, and it's my experience that getting off to a good start is crucial.  And we had fun.  One day we stopped for lunch at Burger King, and we ate in the truck.  There were no cupholders, so while eating I was in the habit of resting a drink on the bottom of the steering wheel so that it leaned against the horn button.  I had parked with the wheels turned slightly, so this time I had to give the steering wheel a laborious partial-turn to lock it into place before my “cupholder” was in place.  We ate our food and shot the breeze, and when it came time to leave, I forgot that I had given the steering wheel the turn to lock it, so when I turned the key over, the steering wheel sprung back to its resting position, launching the three-quarters full cup of soda into a 540-degree spin before it landed upside-down on my lap.  I can still hear the sound of Leonard laughing.

Have a safe and profitable week.

Sincerely,
Nick Kemper
www.TowPartsNow.com