Oral History Interview with Tim Smith

[Begin Interview]

Interviewer: This is interview on May the twelfth, for Kentucky Historical Society slideshow. And we’re talking with–

Smith: Tim Smith.

Interviewer: Out of Hazard. Tim, what, how many, just tell us about your normal day. How many loads you carry. And, and something about the trucks.

Smith: Well, on this particular haul, we’re running three loads a day, from Hazard into Maysville. And each load takes about twenty-seven hours. And three loads makes it a pretty long day. Don’t get much sleeping at night. Anywhere, sometimes we get three to four hours. Sometimes we go a couple of days without sleeping, period. And we haul about twenty, anywhere from twenty-five to twenty-seven tons. We try to run legal on state highways. Because if we don’t, we got a little weigh tag man, and he kind of gives you a little citation, about, anywhere from two hundred to three hundred dollars.

Interviewer: That makes it pretty rough. On your, tell us again how much you carry per load.

Smith: Twenty-five to twenty-seven tons.

Interviewer: The---ha-, have you been hauling coal for a long time?

Smith: Yeah. About six years.

Interviewer: And Tom said that you’ve been in it for yourself, with your own truck.

Smith: Yes. As soon as I got out of high school, my dad put me in it. And I hauled coal. And the coal business got bad a couple of years ago, and I went over the road hauling freight and steel. Trucking, it was bad then, too, that’s when trucking was so bad. And I got a couple, three payments behind, and finance company wanted it more than I did. So, I had to let, had to let it go.

Interviewer: How much does one of these [those] units cost?

Smith: Well, price on it runs, it was about thirty-five thousand dollars. And now everything’s gone up. A tractor by itself will cost you anywhere from forty-two to forty-six thousand dollars.

Interviewer: How much a trailer cost?

Smith: Well, all depends on what kind of trailer you buy. This coal trailer here particularly costs about from twelve to fifteen thousand, depends on the brand and the length and height, the kind that you buy.

Interviewer: The, what, what sort of, we may not put this in but, in the show. What sort of money does a, a man hauling coal make?

Smith: Well, like I said, the three loads a day, it pays the driver from thirty-five to forty dollars. Normally twenty-five percent of what the truck makes off the top. And you’ll range anywhere from four to five hundred dollars a week.

Interviewer: That’s long hours, isn’t it?

Smith: Uh, yeah. That’s four, normally four hours sleep a day is what we base it on.

Interviewer: [out of mic range]

Smith: Well, you own your own truck, really, the profit’s no more, because you have to pay your, put yourself on a salary about the same as what a driver makes. And when you’re driving for somebody, you don’t have any headaches. You don’t have to worry. When you blow a tire out, you just call the owner and he comes and fixes it, and that’s it. You gross, with your own, with your truck, normally twelve to fifteen hundred dollars a week. And time your fuel and tire wear and oil comes out of it, no, the driver’s better off in the long run.

Interviewer: What sort of fuel does it take to accommodate–

Smith: Fuel, fuel consumption is about five to six miles a gallon.

Interviewer: You ought to be burning coal, it sounds like.

Smith: Yeah. That’s what we should be burning. So, we have to pay an additional two cents a gallon tax on top of what the fuel is at the station for, [ ] for paying the use of the highways. What a lot of people don’t understand when they come up on you in a four-wheeler, that, you know, that you don’t, that you’re paying, what, sixty-one cents a gallon instead of the fifty-nine that you pay at the pumps.

Interviewer: You’re burning gasoline, as opposed to a diesel?

Smith: We’re, we run diesel in these. It’s a little bit cheaper than gasoline.

Interviewer: Tell, tell us again about, because we didn’t really get the right kind of start on that.

Smith: Well, our co-, coal hauling we start on a Monday morning, start loading here at six o’clock. And we, at the end of the day you’ll, through about two in the night, and then if you’re lucky, you’ll get four hours sleep until six. And if you was running over the road and not hauling coal, like hauling steel and stuff like that, you have to log, keep a book. And you’d have to haul eight hours, and then rest. But on this coal haul, where we’re running the state of Kentucky, we run just the limit, just ever what all we can haul. And some people, you don’t have to have as much sleep as others. Some have to have more. Four hours a day does me sufficient, so. [truck noises]

[possible pause in tape]

[truck noises]

Interviewer: Sound effects of coal truck. Coal being dumped. [more noises] Cat tractor into a coal truck. General ambient of area. That’s a second load of coal being dumped. Coal being d-, dumped by Cat front loader into a coal truck.

[End Interview.]