Throughout Overdrive's history, contributions to the magazine from working owner-operators and other truckers have been a primary way to keep the magazine grounded in the interests and concerns of the readership. The focus tracks all the way back to founder Mike Parkhurst, who as a young man had been an owner-operator himself before starting the magazine, to the present, where the Voices section of our website takes the place of traditional letters to the editor and working operators like Clifford Petersen and Paul Marhoefer offer their own original stories.
In 2018 another such operator, writer and photographer Don Christner, by happenstance discovered a trove of history in the area around his Cheyenne, Wyoming, home base. As he wrote:
I was driving on a gravel road here in Wyoming when the sight of a big Marmon COE unexpectedly caught my eye. I hadn’t seen one in years. There were more unusual trucks in this yard, trucks from the 1970s and early 80s carefully parked in a row: The Marmon, a Diamond Reo cabover, too. A Mack Superliner, a Diamond Reo conventional and an Emeryville.
Just a few of the classics Christner found.
These are the trucks that were on the road when I was a young man, straight-up-honest work trucks from an era that’s gone and almost forgotten. There was a freedom and a high sense of ownership and responsibility from that time that now seems gone from trucking.
