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IN MEMORY MIKE 1934 · 1999 |
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On the CB, when a driver is done for the day, he says he's 10-7. Out of service. My dad said it
about a hundred thousand times in thirty years, usually from a truck stop in a town I'd never
heard of, and then he'd go find a pay phone and call home. On February 11 of this year he went
10-7 for good, at home in Amarillo, in his chair, with the TV on the weather channel, the way he
always had it. His heart. He was 64.
I'm his daughter, Dottie Sigler. I'm 37, I live in Tulsa with my husband and our two kids, and I work in the office at a freight company, which is Dad's fault. I started this page for Father's Day, June 20. It was the first Father's Day I didn't have anybody to buy a coffee mug for. |
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THE LOGBOOK
1934. Born in Amarillo, Texas. His dad worked for the railroad and his mother's people came up from Chihuahua. Named Miguel after his grandfather; called Mike by everybody but his mother. 1952–1955. The Army. He drove a deuce-and-a-half in Germany and said that ruined him for any job with a desk. 1957. Married my mom, Yvonne, after a dance at the Legion hall. Worked at a feed store and drove a grain truck at harvest. 1966. Got his first over-the-road job, pulling a reefer for a produce outfit. Lettuce out of Salinas, onions out of the Rio Grande Valley, going east. That year I was four and my brother Tommy was two, and Mom says we thought Daddy lived in the telephone. 1978. Bought his own truck and went owner-operator: a red Peterbilt 359 with a long hood. He loved that truck more than some of his relatives. He named it Rosalita, after nobody. He said he just liked the name. 1988. Traded Rosalita for a Kenworth W900, also red, which he never named, because he said you only get one Rosalita. 1994. A heart attack at a truck stop in Missouri. A bypass. He went back out six months later against everybody's advice. 1996. Parked it for good in June, thirty years almost to the day. Sold the Kenworth to a young driver from Lubbock and cried in the driveway when it pulled away. Only time I ever saw it. 1999. 10-7. |
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OLD 66
When he started, the interstate across Texas and New Mexico wasn't finished yet, and a lot of the time he was running on old 66, right through the middle of every little town, past every motel and cafe with a neon sign. He said you could get a hamburger and a slice of pie and a fill-up and hear all the news in the world in any one of those towns, and then the interstate came and went around them, and one by one they dried up. By the time they took the 66 signs down for good in 1985, he'd been running I-40 for years. But he never called it anything but 66. Neither do I. Between Amarillo and Tulsa, if you ride with me, I'll show you every place he ever stopped. It will take you all day. |
THINGS HE ALWAYS SAID
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THE LAST RIDE
His funeral was February 16 at our church in Amarillo, and it was cold and windy like it always is there. His old friend Bill Reavis, who drove for the same produce outfit back in the sixties, called around on the phone and on the CB, and when we came out of the church there were eleven rigs lined up down the street behind the hearse with their lights on. Drivers I'd never met. Some of them had just heard about it on channel 19 that morning and turned around. They followed us all the way to the cemetery. When they lowered him down, every one of them pulled the air horn at once. My mother, who hated those horns for forty years, held on to my arm and laughed and cried at the same time. |
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THE POSTCARDS Dad sent us a postcard from almost every trip for thirty years. Mom kept every one in shoeboxes in the hall closet. There are more than eleven hundred. I've typed up some of the best ones, front and back. Read Dad's postcards >> |
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I have boxes of his pictures, him and Rosalita in about forty states, but no scanner. My son Trey
says they have one at the high school and he'll do some for me this fall. So check back.
If you're a driver, and you knew Tumbleweed out there, I would love to hear from you. Tell me where you ran into him. Tell me what he was eating. (Probably chicken-fried steak.) |
