Citizens Band

If you're over fifty, you'll remember a time when everyone who owned a car installed a CB radio in it. The entire country went bonkers over mobile radio sets. It seems quaint and a bit laughable in hindsight, but the sudden availability of two-way radios which did not require a license to operate created an entire subculture, and it rapidly spread into the population at large. Movies like Convoy and Smokey and the Bandit plugged into the national craze. By 1979, even your grandma had a CB in her car. Hey, she never knew when the fuzz might be waiting to ambush her on the way to church!

The fad had dwindled by the mid 1980s, reverting to a mostly trucker-only fraternity, (much to the relief of truckers everywhere, I'm sure), but you still occasionally saw an antenna on the trunk of a private automobile, even into the 1990s. My last CB was in a 1980 Ford Econoline van that I had purchased to move back to Texas when I left the Marine Corps in 1993. The previous owner had installed the radio and I saw no point in removing it. I can still recall an amusing CB incident during that trip.

I was crossing the mountains between California and Arizona on I-10 and it was turning into a bit of a struggle. I had that ancient six-cylinder conversion van loaded down with my collected junk, and the poor old nag wasn't taking kindly to being forced up the side of a mountain at her age. As a result, I was moving well below the speed limit -- an extraordinarily rare occurrence for me. It was late at night and I was tuned into the trucker CB frequency, more out of boredom than anything else, as FM radio coverage in that area was sparse. Two truckers were chatting away and I was shamelessly eavesdropping on their conversation to keep myself awake. After a few minutes of listening to them bitch about women and bosses, I heard one of them loudly proclaim, "Come on, yankee! Get that fuckin' hunk o' junk out of the way!" At first I didn't realize who he was talking to, then I remembered that my newly-acquired Freedom Chariot still had Michigan plates. On a hunch, I moved onto the shoulder.

Sure enough, two trucks went past, one of them transmitting a sheepish "Thanks" as he went by. I replied "You're welcome. But I'm a Texan, only the van is a yankee." He laughed and called "10-27 Bravo," which meant he was telling his trucker friend to switch to a prearranged alternate channel. I didn't bother trying to find the new channel. Boring conversation anyway.