My first experience in a tow truck was on a family trip to Disneyland and back.  We were about 40 miles south of Bakersfield when the tranny went out in our '72 Skylark.  My parents had AAA, and we waited 4 hours for a tow truck.  Fortunately, we were on our way home from Disneyland.  Myself, my two brothers, and my parents all squeezed into the cab with the tow truck driver, in 100+ degrees, no A/C, and drove the 40 miles to Bakersfield.  Not fun.  The driver was nice, however.  I remember him taking us to a motel after we dropped the car off at a tranny shop, and we got 2 days in the pool while the car was being fixed.

3 adults and 3 kids (ages 10, 11, and 12) in the truck. Can we beat that?

Years later, I was working swing shift and got a police rotation call on US 26 westbound out of Portland.  There is a steep climb leaving the downtown area, through a forested area, and many cars conk out on this hill.  This night, an old mini-van had lost its clutch on a bend in the road where the emergency lane was not even wide enough for a single car.

The family in the van had just flown in from Disneyworld, Orlando to Portland.  It was almost midnight, dead of summer, very hot and muggy.  They were extremely tired.  The father wanted the van towed to his mechanic about 10 miles away, and they lived about 10 miles west of where they had broken down, just off the highway.

A family of 7, with 5 kids, all teenagers.

Yes, 7 people, 5 teenagers.  The youngest was autistic.

While the police blocked the lane for the hookup, I told the father we would have to call a cab for most of them, as there were only 3 seat belts in the truck.  The danger of the area made it necessary to get them off the highway.  There was an exit just about a half-mile up the road.  He asked if some of them could ride in the towed vehicle.  I knew that wouldn't fly, especially if some of them were teenagers.  There was only one time I ever let someone ride in a towed vehicle, a man who was extremely inebriated, and he thought he was going to be sick.  I made him sit in the back seat.

I had to get these people off the freeway.  A cab wasn't even going to respond to this location.  So I told them all to pile into the cab of the tow truck, and we'd get off the freeway.

Hard to say who was sitting on whom, but at least two people were facing to the rear, basically sitting on the dashboard.  The police officer immediately zoomed past me, on his way to another call, and I was about to take the exit when I asked how everyone was doing.  They were all laughing about the situation, having a great time.  I asked the father again where they lived.  I thought about it a moment, and then I told them we were just going to go for it.

This little episode could certainly have put a damper on the end of their trip, but I think it might have ended up being the exclamation point.  We all laughed and yelled and jostled and I think maybe a few punches were thrown, but hey, we're talking 5 teenagers who have been on a plane for 7 hours and probably awake for at least 15.

They all piled out at their home, unloaded the luggage from the van, and I told the father that I could get his van dropped off at the mechanic without him, and told him to call it a night.  They were all happy to be home, and I got two very sincere thank-yous from the parents.

Have a safe and profitable week.

Sincerely,
Nick Kemper
www.TowPartsNow.com

Training, particularly Driver Training, is one of those fields that requires supreme patience.  I had one of the best Driver Trainers in the business working for me for several years at an impound company.  It helped that he had 25 years of experience and had won several state and regional driving competitions, both light- and heavy-duty.  He did most of the training, but before I would unleash the new Driver onto the unsuspecting public, I’d try to run a few shifts with the new Driver.

 I really wanted our female drivers to succeed, so we gave them the best training we could.  One evening I was working a swing shift with one of them, and things were going smoothly when I got a phone call from one of our carrier drivers.  He was in a rural area, doing a police impound, and he was stuck.  It was almost 10 pm, and I’d been at work since 8 that morning.  Boy, did I ever regret answering that call.

Sheila and I drove out to find him.  He was 20 miles outside of town, near a main river.  Some miscreants had evidently been doing something wrong, and the County Sheriff had busted them and had their 2 vehicles impounded.  They were on a dirt road a quarter-mile from the paved road.  Another driver had the smaller car and was waiting for us out at the paved road.  He didn't want to leave until we got there.  I soon found out why.

They’d been there for about 3 hours.  The police had broken up a group of people fishing down by the river.  They scattered when the police showed up.  When our drivers arrived, the police left.  When the police left, the people came back.  Fortunately, the police were nearby and returned to find that 2 of the people had outstanding warrants.  They arrested them and shooed everyone else away.  Again, they left (which is a little odd).

The larger vehicle was a 1-ton dually pickup, with no keys.  Noone would cough up the keys.  In the marshy terrain, this made it very difficult to position and load the vehicle.  If we would’ve had the keys, we would’ve just driven it out to the paved road and then loaded it onto the carrier.  The drivers got it onto the carrier, with great difficulty, but the ground was so slick, and our trucks had highway tires, so the driver could not get turned around and probably couldn’t have stayed on the slick road anyway.

The truck I was driving was a four-wheel drive, but still had highway tires.  Sheila and I drove out the goat trail and found the carrier driver.  After a lot of slipping, sliding, and general mayhem (both in the truck and on foot), we decided that to try to get the pickup out with the smaller wrecker.  We got the pickup off the carrier bed, and then, after about an hour of throwing mud, we were able to get it onto the wrecker.  The wrecker was an Eagle, and the pickup was a dually, so the Eagle Strap went up and over the inside dual tire and the ratchet was wedged between the dual tires.  Not ideal.

The goat trail wound through a forest, was narrow, and the mud was so slick that the front end of the pickup simply would slide to whichever side of the road had a downward slope to it, EVEN if we were stationary.  What a nightmare!  We backed the carrier down the road in intervals, winching off of side trees to pull the front of the pickup away from trees when it would slide over too far.  In the middle of all this, Sheila, the trainee (bless her soul--Sheila, I hold a special place in my heart for you--if you're reading this, don't take any of this personally), continually spouted off about how she had been "four-wheeling all her life" and had been "stuck worse than this many times" and offered one crazy suggestion after another.  The winching off the side trees might have been one of them, and I'll give her credit--that worked for awhile.  But the carrier simply couldn't maneuver in the mud, which was getting worse as it got colder and damper.

Finally, I got a little momentum and made it around a couple of bends in the road, and then we came to a rise in the road, followed by about a hundred-foot passage across a swamp (not much water--just mud and tall grass), where the road had been built by dumping fill-dirt into the swamp.  The road was crowned (bad).  I made it over the rise, and about 30 feet across the swamp, and the front end of the pickup took a dive down to my left and into the swamp, wedging against a log submerged in the swamp.

That was a far as we were going to get.

The carrier driver's radio wasn't working well, and I think his cell phone was dead.  He was still back with the carrier.  I finally got ahold of him, told him to lock up the carrier, and walk out to us.  I found a knife and cut the straps off the tow truck and was able to pull away from the pickup.  When the carrier driver got there, we loaded into the cab of the truck and drove back to the shop.  It was 3 a.m. when we got back, and I spent about an hour housing mud off of and out of the wrecker.

Around 7, I called Mitch, my trainer.  I told him the nature of the mess, and where it was, and I went back to bed.  At 11, I woke up, got in my car, and headed out there.  I got a message that the pickup was out and in the storage lot, and they were going back for the carrier.  I also got a call that the vehicle owner was on his way to the storage lot to get the pickup.  I got to the storage lot about 15 minutes ahead of the vehicle owner.  I inspected the pickup--muddy, but no damage, which is amazing, because I remembered bouncing it off a few trees before leaving it in the swamp.  I wrote up an invoice for approximately $750.  The owner showed up a few minutes later, paid in full in cash, and drove it away.  I drove out to the scene, and there was Mitch, with a different trainee, loading up carpet remnants and buckets of heavy gravel they had brought to help them, onto the carrier bed, at the paved road.  They were done and ready to head back.

Unbelievable.

Have a safe and profitable week.

Sincerely,

Nick Kemper

www.TowPartsNow.com