‘COME ON GOOD BUDDY, WHAT’S YOUR HANDLE?

The recent death of C.W. McCall at the age of 93 didn’t exactly make front page headlines, but it got me thinking back to the age of CB radios because it was the illustrious William Dale Fries Jr., as his parents called him, who helped make these into a worldwide craze.

C.W. was a name he adopted when selling loaves of bread at an Omaha ad agency and he quickly became the number one troubadour of truck-driving songs with the 1976 smash hit, Convoy, later filmed by Sam Peckinpah with Kris Kristofferson intoning “Breaker one-nine, this here’s the Rubber Duck,” from the cab of his 18-wheeler. A Rubber Duck is always the first man in a Convoy, by the way, just in case you didn’t see the movie.

I had a good friend who we called The Lad - he’s still my Facebook friend these days, actually, and back in the 1970s he embraced the CB radio craze with a vengeance, getting one properly fitted to the dashboard of his, er, Ford Fiesta. Thereafter he spent many a happy hour driving round the lawless back roads of Surrey warning other similarly attuned drivers of “Smokies” on patrol. Once he even warned of a “bear in the air” when he spotted a police chopper.