Showed dad the article … He said, “Better than being on the cover of Rolling Stone.” Went on to tell me a story of when he was younger: “When we first saw an Overdrive magazine, Grandpo (his dad) owned a little hole-in-the-wall gas station in Los Lunas, N.M. One day a driver delivering fuel showed up and needed to get turned around and to do so he needed to drive down the road to do it. He ask Dad if he wanted to go with him on the big truck… Dad said heck yeah, and jumped in the cab, and mentioned an Overdrive mag the driver had on the seat. When they got back the driver gave the magazine to dad. Dad said it was the most awesome thing ever. He said he kept it till it fell apart. So that’s why dad is so excited about this article. He said, “Who would have thought all these years later? Thought I would share that with you.
The “Rolling Stone” of trucking magazines is a pretty apt description of Overdrive, and having an opportunity to begin my writing career at such an elevated level is still one of the best things I ever did accidentally.
The unplanned nature of the first George and Wendy Show blog post leads me to believe the unplanned nature of the last post (for OverdriveOnline.com, anyway, and i.e., this post –ed., gonna miss it) is just another weird and cosmic occurrence in our trucking adventures that was meant to be.
I’ve written close to a thousand pieces for this little spot of heaven, and we’ve traveled hundreds and thousands of miles while I wrote them, so when George walked into a trucking company eight miles from our home to drop off truck show information and found one of the most complete collections of the very magazine for which we’d provided content the last six years, I knew it was meant to be and the perfect post to close our tenure at Overdrive.
Jerry Howard got his first subscription when he was a kid. The July 1970 edition was the first he remembers taking care of and wanting to preserve, but it wasn’t the first issue he owned. “I used to pay my older brothers to take me to the 69 truck stop so I could buy a copy,” he says. “When I got my subscription, I didn’t even have a checking account. I gave my mom the money and she wrote a check for it.”
