Route 66 west of Seligman, looking west
1937 IML doubles
Chambers Transfer & Storage Building, circa late 1920s
evolutions, the rise and fall of unionization, regulation, deregulation, consolidation and the transformational impact of modern communications on trucking in Arizona and in the U.S. By the end of the 1920s, truckers
wanted to be able to make longer runs, so manufacturers began to offer more equipment options. Truck manufacturers soon offered sleeper cabs on both straight trucks and tractors, but the first sleepers were actually designed into the noses of truck trailers—until they were banned in 1952 for safety reasons. With the booming economy of the Roaring Twenties, trucking grew and flourished—until the devastating stock market crash of October 29, 1929. What follows are very brief snapshots
of the decades in the Arizona Trucking Association’s 75-year history, told in the broader context of the industry’s history.
Arizona Trucking Association 2012 Yearbook
The 1930s Fledging trucking companies that
survived the Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed faced significant challenges. Consumers couldn’t afford to buy what manufacturers had to sell and soon truckers had very little to haul. Hundreds of companies closed their doors altogether. But among the survivors were names we still recognize today, though most of them and some of their companies are long gone: Leland James, founder of Consolidated Freightways; Owen Orr, who started Motor Cargo; Earl Congdon of Old Dominion Freight Lines; Jim Ryder of Ryder Truck Lines; and Tom Carter, who founded Interstate Motor Lines, to name just a few. As with any new industry, regulation
soon followed. In 1933, the American Highway Freight Association and the Federation Trucking Associations of America met in Chicago to form American Trucking
Associations, Inc., to protect carriers’ interests at the national level as Congress began debating how to regulate the industry. The Motor Carrier Act of 1935 brought trucks and buses under the jurisdiction of the Interstate Commerce Commission and gave it authority to regulate the rates carriers could charge, where and what they could haul and how long drivers could drive. States began to establish their own trucking rules, build ports of entry to check truck sizes and weights, and to collect taxes and fees.
In Arizona, a loosely knit group of
truckers began talking about forming their own association to ensure fair regulations and taxes at the state level, and to offer services to the industry. On September 8, 1937, shortly after the ICC issued its first set of rules implementing the Motor Carrier Act, 16 trucking company owners filed Articles of
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