Happy Truckers
1959 was my senior year of high school, and I worked part-time at the gas station on the north end of The Lake before Dad got me a better job for the summer in Kalamazoo. It was the year of the Chevy Batwing, and the guy from Chicago who owned the station had a son who worked with me, and owned a brand new black one with red interior. This was also a time when the auto industry was booming, and M60 was a continuous parade of trucks carrying everything from piston rings to tail pipes across the State to Detroit. The trucks had no reason to stop at the station for gas because they couldn’t fit into the driveway, so most (not all) went sailing by at top speed.
Gas Station 2025
The station is still there, but it has undergone several major remodels. The pumps used to be on the highway side of the building, and the front was all windows, from waist high to the ceiling. We could sit inside and see when a car pulled in, and we could also see directly across M60 to the only house on that side of the road. It was an older house with screened windows across the front to keep mosquitoes out on warm Summer evenings, and storm windows for snow in Winter. There was a gravel driveway on one side and a garage in the back. The house and grounds were remarkably well maintained – something not very common in that part of the Country in those days.
Happy Trucker House – 2025
One day, a big semi-trailer, probably loaded up with car parts, headed for Detroit, stopped on the shoulder, right in front of that house. The driver got out and went to the side door. After a moment or two, the door opened and he went in. A while later, he came back out and continued on down the road. I guess we thought he must live there and was just stopping to pick up something, or maybe he knew the owner, but we didn’t think much about it until the same thing happened a day or two later. It was a different truck this time, but the driver went to the side door just like the previous guy, reemerging a short time later.
Then, a few days later, a maintenance worker came by and parked in the exact same spot on the shoulder of the highway. He mowed the grass and did a few odd jobs before going to the side door, whereupon he disappeared inside for an hour or so before returning to his truck to head back toward Three Rivers. Neither of us had worked at the station very long, and both were becoming “curiouser and curiouser” because these random visits seemed to be increasing in frequency.
Several weeks went by, Winter turned into Spring, and the trucks kept coming. Then, one sunny afternoon, the presumptive owner of the house came out and walked straight across the highway towards the station with a small red gas can in her hand. She was tall and slim, walking barefoot across the concrete pavement, wearing short shorts and a tattered T-shirt. The shirt had a hole in front, big enough to throw your wallet through, and big enough to observe a pair of bare, perfectly-shaped, sun-tanned breasts.
In an instant, everything came clear, and the mystery had been solved. We had no doubt that those truckers were among the happiest truckers in all of southern Michigan.
By: Jim
Written: September 22, 2025
Published: October 8, 2025
Revised: