This tale starts on a cold windy and snowy Friday night in Jan 1979. I was driving truck hauling meat out of Denver. To the east coast, there was a big storm passing east of Denver.
I had a load that wouldn’t be ready until 6 pm; around 5pm Colorado closed all of the main roads going east out of Denver.
At 6 pm I went down to Curtis picked up my paper work, fueled the truck, hooked up to the loaded trailer and did the pre-trip inspection so the truck was ready to go when the roads opened. There wasn’t any reason to go thirty miles and sit in the truck waiting for the road to open so I went back home.
I always liked to have some kind of music on when I was driving and there were so many places that you could not pick up anything that I would recorded my favorite radio station on tape while I was listening to the road reports, I would play the tapes when I got tired of listening to the tapes that I had owned.
Around 5 am they opened I 70 and I got out of Denver.
A few weeks later I was on the last leg of an east coast run. I had made my last fuel stop in Omaha, ate a good meal, It was a beautiful clear moonless night, the road was dry and the sky was full of stars life was good. I was less than nine hours from being home and I was looking forward to having a good time in Denver before I left out again.
It was around midnight when I pulled back onto westbound I 80. I only had to make one more stop at the scales entering CO for my port slip. Nebraska was one of the best states to drive across at night back then, I 80 was in good shape and late at night then the cops would see a bunch of trucks running together driving in single file doing around 72 -75 mph they would leave us alone and let us go about our business.
I could hear a couple of drivers talking on the CB. One of them was telling a story, now being a good story-teller is a skill that carries a lot of weight on (CB) Channel 19.
The driver that was doing the most talking was a good old southern boy with the kind of voice everyone likes to listen to. I caught up with them slowed down and fell in about a block or so behind them.
He was headed for Seattle I would be dropping south on I76. When you drive coast to coast it’s not unusual to meet someone and spend a day or more running together.
We would spend the next 5 hours 350 mile with him doing most of the talking.
At some point I changed the tape in the radio, and someone came on the CB and asked me what station I was listening to. I told him it was a station in Denver. The CB was quiet for a while then someone came back on and he said he could not pick up anything but though he heard something about the roads being closed around Denver on my radio when I was talking. I decided to have some fun. I said I wasn’t paying attention it.
I waited a while backed up the tape turned the volume up and keyed the mike so everyone could hear them reporting about I 70 I 25 and I 76 being closed.
You never know how many people are listening on a CB but all of a sudden we had 5 or 6 drivers talking about if the roads were going to be closed ahead maybe we should stop somewhere before we got stuck in a snow storm waiting for the roads to open.
As we went past an exit a cop turned on his blue lights for a second and told everyone to drive carefully when we got to the storm. He knew there wasn’t any storm ahead of us.
Since I was the only one picking up the Denver station I was telling everyone that the snow was letting up on I 80 and I 76 and they may be open for a while before the worst part of the storm got there.
Three of us turned onto south on I76 the weather was clear and nice, it was warm when we got to the CO scales. I waited until then to tell everyone about how I had recorded the radio station and we all had a good laugh.
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