01/30/16

We Were Ahead in This Trucking Trend

girl_truckers with dollyI’ve read the reports and I was thrilled to find: Mattel is making more realistic dolls, dolls that look like real women. We were ahead of this curve–in the trucking industry–by writing about real women truckers.

How so? In“Grandpa and the Truck,” “Girl Truckers” is story 2 in Book 2. Each book (we’ve published 2) has beautifully-illustrated stories, maps, trucker lingo, guide questions.

As author, I based our series on the 30-year career of my big rig driving partner, a man who traveled through every state in the United States. Those two “girl truckers” were legendary female drivers from Rhode Island who could wield their own big rig and do the job as well (if not better) than any trucker he’d ever met.

Millie and Mollie were raised by their trucker Dad, “Leatherneck” O’Day . Truckers often have nicknames, and they give their trucks nicknames, too. My partner (and hero of the series) is “Gater” and he called his big rig “Proud Mary,” after that CCR song, about the riverboat whose wheels were ‘rollin…rollin…rollin. ‘

The girls named their truck “Pink Lady.”

It was easy for fellow truckers to see “Pink Lady” approaching on the superslabs (trucker lingo for highways.)

So, that’s it in a nutshell. Our books speak to equality in opportunity that is even more important today than it was in my generation (I’m a grandmother) for trucker ranks will be seriously depleted in years to come. This article speaks to that.

We have 6 more books in this series, awaiting publication. Each story is set in a different region. The next will be about the famous Woodstock Music Festival seen as only a trucker could (ironically, it didn’t happen in Woodstock!) and then this trucker’s West Virginia mining story.

As we say in our tagline: “We teach geography…and a whole lot more.”

It is our hope that America’s children will learn about our vast country through the journeys of our big rig, along with its unflappable, quirky driver (who won awards for his driving expertise)… and not solely via GPS devices.

But we also see dolls modeled on Millie and Mollie, two of this country’s first female big rig drivers.