Thompson enjoys spending time with area driver’s ed students, helping them to develop into safe, responsible drivers.
“He told me that if you want to be a professional driver, you have to act like one,” Thompson says, “and I’ve remembered that all these years.” When the Gulf Coast “oil patch” took an economic nosedive in the mid 1980s as crude oil prices went below $10/barrel, Thompson was laid off from his crew boat job, moved back to Mobile and became a driver for a forklift dealership, delivering equipment all over the Southeast. He did that for a year, as a Class B driver, “But what I really wanted to be was a professional over-the-road driver,” he says. In fact, soon afterward he was headed to a North American Van Lines seminar but stuck in a traffic jam on I-65 near Saraland when he noticed a sign for trucking firm Dixie Drayage. He got off the interstate, went inside and asked if they needed any drivers. He started the next day, and he’s been driving accident-free for 34 years ever since. Thompson says another big memory is the first day he went on a ride with his trainer, a physically imposing guy who, as Thompson was leaving the lot, screamed: “Stop the truck! Stop the damn truck!” He looked directly at Thompson and said, “What are you thinking about?” Thompson says he didn’t know what to say, thought he had already done something wrong and was about to lose his dream job before he ever really started. He mumbled something about his girlfriend. 6
“Well, you better be thinking about getting out of this gate without busting a mirror” the trainer said. “And then you better be thinking about getting to that stop sign without hitting a parked car, then how wide a turn you’re gonna make, just like that, every step of the way.” Those words still ring in Thompson’s ears every day on every haul he makes: “He really taught me how to think about driving, step by step, each step of the way,” he says. Thompson drove for Dixie Drayage, plus
several other trucking companies in the Mobile area, then in 1999 began driving for Watkins Motor Lines, which was acquired by FedEx in 2006, and he’s been there 20 years. “It’s not work when you love it, and that’s the main thing about my career—I love what I do,” Thompson says. He says his dream of becoming a big chrome longhaul trucker has changed, especially when he saw the effect that kind of work can have on a marriage, and he’s happy with the regional role he has with FedEx. On the flip side, Thompson says with a smile, “I probably could get home a little earlier every day, but I wash the truck at least three times a day so sometimes I’m late.”
Over The Years
Thompson has been on the Alabama Road Team since 2013.
Looking at some of the changes he’s seen in his career, Thompson says in general modern rigs are safer, much easier to drive and get much better fuel efficiency. “I remember back in the 1980s you’d get trucks with no A/C, no power steering and really tight clutches that would just wear you out,” he adds. Thompson says he misses the gear shifting and had to get adjusted to that, but he believes the automatic transmissions wear better and allow more consistent driving across the fleet. “When you were running all manual transmissions everyone would work the clutch a little differently and I A LABAMA T RUCKER • 2 ND Q UARTER 2019