Dave Barry Entertains at MC&E
ORLANDO, Fla. — Author and columnist Dave Barry only said the word “trucking” three times, but he delivered humor and guffaws to the American Trucking Associations’ Management Conference & Exhibition here.
While steering away from trucking, Barry brought laughs from the early morning Oct. 21 crowd, drawing from other forms of transportation and far-flung destinations such as the Oregon coast and North Dakota.
Particularly, he focused on his home town of Miami, where he has written more than 30 books. His lead transport joke poked fun at Miami’s past reputation, relating a conversation between a local and a New Jersey friend who asked “what do you do down there?”
The answer: “tailgunner on a beer truck.”
Moving right along, the 66-year old found humor in senior citizens’ unique approach to transportation, like welding two Oldsmobiles together so they could only see through the steering wheel. Or the disturbing fact that Miami leads the country in accidents where a car hits a building, “and sometimes pretty far into the building.”
He also related another true mishap story – a 73-year old who drove his Chevy Cobalt onto Runway 9 at Miami International Airport.
“If I am driving and tailgating a 757, I would realize one of us is out there in the wrong place,” he observed.
He also shared a personal driving experience, in the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile. All went well until he decided to pick up his 13-year old son at school and use its loudspeaker to summon his eighth grader while in a line full of Moms driving minivans. He called that technique “parenting by embarrassment.”
Farther afield, he regaled attendees with his experience in North Dakota, where more than a decade ago state officials and business leaders convened a meeting to drum up tourism and somehow thought that dropping the word North from the state’s name might help.
A few months after Barry poked fun at the idea, he found himself a tourist — in January — to attend the dedication of a sewage lifting station in Grand Forks that was named after him, with foot-high letters on the side of the building.
Then there was the matter of a highway division-related incident in Oregon, which he at first said contained a message ATA attendees should take away from his talk.
The subject was serious — an actual 1970 incident in which a 43-foot whale was stranded on the beach and died, eventually generating such a stink that officials felt obliged to remove it.
Their solution was to use dynamite, let seagulls eat the remains and surround the whale with traffic cones and flagmen like a construction project. However, he said, there was one problem. Nobody from the highway department thought about gravity, which left spectators and TV regretting their presence.
After the story, he admitted there was no actual message, except to not call the Oregon highway division if you have a dead whale on your beach.
