The photo is of my brother Jeff Hendrix. I’m writing this and putting this fundraiser together for him because he’s not the most web-savvy guy in the world, while I’ve been designing, building, and adminning websites for many years, in addition to driving trucks between web-design jobs.

The truck-driving gig is something Jeff and I have had in common for a long, long time—going all the way back to 1981, in fact, when I got my first freight-hauling job with Emery Air Freight, the pioneering air-freight pickup and delivery/logistics/freight forwarding company started by US Navy veteran John C Emery, Sr right after the end of WW2, in 1946. Two years after I was hired there, I put a word in with my boss and helped Jeff get on with Emery, driving cargo vans and straight-trucks like I’d been doing.

From there, both Jeff and myself went on to long stints at Emery competitor Airborne Express, working for two different sub-drayage contractors. Next, it was a stretch at Bax Global, where Jeff trained for and got his Class-A license and moved on up to the big leagues: eighteen-wheel tractor-trailer rigs pulling 53-foot enclosed trailers, the final step in the truck-driver’s evolution.

After Bax went the way of the dodo, Jeff took his hard won rig jockey skills to Phoenix Metals, hauling a flatbed trailer loaded with sheet steel. He worked for Phoenix for 7 years, then decided to take the owner-operator plunge and buy his own tractor—a used 2000 Freightliner Classic XL in well-above-average condition—to haul containers from the Charleston, SC and Savannah, GA seaports as an independent B-drayage contractor for Horizon Freight.

After eight years at Horizon pulling in the most money he’d ever earned in his trucking career, the utter economic disaster that IS the Biden economy has put paid to all that, as the container-hauling business came to a screeching, smoking halt in January 2021. Jeff says that the collapse was almost immediate and quite noticeable, much like a Semi crashing into a brick wall. HIGHLY EXPERIENCED drivers who had worked the container runs for twenty, even thirty years, found themselves desperately looking for other trucking work. To hear him talk about it with his fellow Horizon drivers (which I have, several times), “disaster" is too mild a word for it; a “apocalyptic” might be more apt.

To attempt to alleviate this issue, a good friend of Jeff’s applied for and got his own authority to form an independent freight-hauling company pulling flatbed, and with him well knowing of my brother’s work ethic, dedication, and conscientiousness on the job, he kindly offered Jeff a gig with the fledgling start-up.

Unfortunately, despite such entrepreneurial enterprises long having been the essence of the American dream, the very cornerstone of America's economic prosperity, Jeff and his new partner learned to their great dismay that these days the deck is stacked against entrepreneurship. See, unbeknownst to most people who aren’t in the industry themselves, nearly all of the trailers rumbling along America’s highways and byways are leased from specialized trailer-rental outfits, not owned by the companies whose logos are emblazoned on the sides and rear of the trailers behind them. And those specialized companies absolutely WILL NOT lease any flatbeds to any freight-hauling concern that hasn’t been in business for a minimum of two (2) full years. Equally unfortunate, his friend is in no position as of now to be able to assist Jeff financially.

Which leaves my brother, after decades of hauling freight all over the Eastern Seaboard reliably, safely, and with nary a whisper of complaint from any of his employers, the shippers, nor any of the consignees. Now, having had his savings account drained completely dry by the Biden economic catastrophe, he must purchase a flatbed trailer of his own.

After the past three frustrating, stressful years of not even being able to cover his expenses with Horizon, it is not by any stretch an enviable position he finds himself in. Even used flatbeds, as it happens, are not what any ordinary working-class stiff would call cheap.

The thing about flatbeds, though, is that no matter how slack times might be in the trucking game overall, guys who are willing to put up with running flatbed can always find work. Flatbeds are downright dangerous, and they require all sorts of specialized equipment like chains, cargo straps, and such for securing their loads and getting them on down the road. Throw in the hassle of loading, securing, maintaining, and just operating a flatbed in general, plus the absolute certainty of being stopped by DOT enforcement and Highway Patrol officers to be minutely inspected, cited, and fined several hundred dollars for “improperly secured load” again and again, ignoring the fact that properly loading and securing the cargo constitutes no part of a big-rig driver’s job—rather, it’s the BIGGEST part of a loading-dock worker’s, usually ALL of it—and it’s no mystery why the vast majority of truck drivers flatly refuse to mess with flatbeds, want nothing whatever to do with them.

Jeff, though, having spent years at Phoenix Metals running the accursed contraptions, is one of the few crazy truckers who doesn’t mind flatbeds at all, he’s perfectly comfortable with them. He claims there are actually a few advantages to them, although danged if I could tell you what they might be.

Hence this fundraiser, which I urged Jeff to consider and have put together for him after overcoming his initial disinclination to, as he put it, having anyone think of him as “a beggar." Please remember that my brother isn’t some kind of scam artist, nor is he a layabout looking for a handout. Neither is he a drunk, a dope addict, a bum, or a swindling fraud in search of an easy payday.

He is not, nor has he ever been, any of those things. What he is, is a hard-working regular Joe (umm, Jeff) who, having been steadily employed in his chosen field his whole adult life, only wants to get back on the job and keep on truckin’ just as quickly as he possibly can. This fundraiser looks as if it might be his last-ditch hope to achieve that modest ambition. I sincerely thank you all on my little brother’s behalf for your kind consideration, attention, and generosity.

This campaign is unpublished.

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