Trucking Executives Lend New Orleans School a Helping Hand

NEW ORLEANS — Nearly 150 trucking executives joined community volunteers on a sunny Saturday in New Orleans to paint, plant and rejuvenate their industry image.

"We've been fortunate to have been involved in trucking and transportation," said Roger Roberson, president of Roberson Transportation of Champagne, Ill. "We believe you got to give something back. It's something we've always taught our kids."

What the volunteers gave back Oct. 24, the day before the opening of the American Trucking Associations' 1998 Management Conference & Exhibition, was a facelift for a worn but historic old school in a blighted neighborhood of New Orleans and a promise of hope for the children inside it. Each industry volunteer donated a day's worth of labor and $50 for supplies to paint and plant trees and shrubbery at the school.

In addition, a dispatch terminal was set up in the school library to link Cherrylaine Johnson's fifth-grade class with a trucker buddy for the next year.

The street surrounding the old school had to be blocked off that morning to make way for Radio Flyer's world's largest red wagon, which Roberson had hauled all the way from Chicago on one of its flatbed trailers. The giant wagon's two-story tires barely fit beneath the utility lines that ring each block around the Morris F. Jeff Elementary School, preventing the wagon's huge black handle from being brought out from beneath the cart and attached to the wagon's towing bar.

The wagon was created after Gen. Colin Powell announced his America's Promise program, which is committed to supporting industry efforts to improving the lives of the nation's 15 million at-risk kids.

"Gen. Powell said kids deserve the opportunity to have nothing more to worry about than a red wagon," said Walter B. McCormick Jr., ATA president. "And we're here in New Orleans to help that happen."

Qualcomm Inc., supplier of mobile communications systems, donated a dispatch terminal that will enable a class of fifth-graders to keep in touch with 40-year trucking veterans Harry and Norma Vogel, who drive for U.S. Xpress of Chattanooga, Tenn.

"We've been wanting to do this for some time because so many of our friends do it," Norma Vogel said. "Besides we love kids and have six of our own and six grandchildren."

Qualcomm's terminal allows the kids to send and receive e-mail with their trucker buddy, check the weather where he's headed and plot his travels on a map, said Susan Hind, industry relations manager for San Diego-based Qualcomm.

The drivers write to the class once a week, sharing their travel experiences with the kids, and the schoolchildren write their trucker buddies once a month, said Tom Wetzel, president of the nonprofit Trucker Buddy International of Chicago. The six-year-old program now oversees some 5,000 truckers who mentor as many school classes across the country.