The recent passing of Bill Mack, 91, brings to mind how the sense of building community for over-the-road drivers has changed – and how it hasn’t.
When Mack began his trucking radio work in 1969 with WBAP-AM in Fort Worth, Texas, cell phone technology, at least for the masses, was decades away. Not to mention social media, texting and email.
Yet Mack was able to function as a one-man nexus for thousands of drivers starved for company and entertainment. He illustrated that when I interviewed him in 2010 at his home studio in Fort Worth, Texas, as he recounted how he was occasionally known by a variation of Midnight Cowboy, his radio name:
In those pre-cell phone days, “We had a lot of truckers’ wives who would call in,” Mack said. He would relay messages, such as a wife letting her husband know that their baby had arrived. “I’d know about baby before Daddy did,” Mack recalled. “A lot of people called me the Midnight Midwife.”
In another instance, he said, a trucker’s girlfriend asked Mack to play for her boyfriend Roy Clark’s “Thank God And Greyhound,” which has the refrain “Thank God and Greyhound you’re gone.” In the subsequent flurry of messages and misunderstandings, “I almost caused a divorce,” Mack said, but the couple eventually worked things out.
“He connected in a way that a lot of radio folks cannot connect,” recalled Eric Harley of WBAP, who worked with Mack for years and took over his program when Mack left to join satellite radio.
