Word: trailerized
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Modern, motorized rustlers are much more efficient than their Old West predecessors. A 20-ft. gooseneck trailer can carry 15 or more yearlings and transport them to stockyards more quickly than any hard-riding band of desperadoes on horseback ever could. A pair of California ranch hands who were arrested for rustling two months ago -- Buddy Goodman, 46, and Benton Demaree, 38 -- allegedly used trailers to ship 45 head of cattle from an area southwest of Fresno to livestock auctions nearly 100 miles miles away in San Luis Obispo and Kern counties. Only when a state cattle-brand inspector spotted...
...knows his customers pretty well. "I go to their trailer homes," he says. "I eat with them in greasy spoons. There's a basic honesty about these people that's missing from those corporate types. These people have their dreams just like I do. No one should take your dreams from...
Goodrum is hunched over the wheel of a Freightliner, straining with all her 106-lb. might to maneuver 61 ft. of tractor-trailer into a parking space that doesn't look large enough for two Corvettes. Like most novice truck drivers, she is confronted by too many tasks demanding simultaneous attention: eyeballing six side-view mirrors, working a gargantuan steering wheel and a muscle-wearying clutch pedal, and monitoring an instrument panel befitting a 727. Goodrum eases the rig back until . . . kerplunk, she mashes into a barricade of tires...
That learning has already come for Richard Coombes, a lanky Missourian. Despite much self-doubt, Coombes has made it through the school with a 91.4 average. As instructors pump his hand, the ex-store clerk clutches a diploma in tractor-trailer driving and grins broadly. "I kept telling myself, 'You can do it. You can do it.' " He sallies into the Texas night, now a king of the road with a new measure of self-esteem: "I can't think of anything that hasn't been hauled in a truck," he says...
Sometimes these pickers seem more casual than they turn out to be. Take Alberta Freeman, 55, who turns up at a recycling trailer in a New Orleans supermarket parking lot with 30-gal. garbage bags bulging with aluminum cans. Freeman, her daughter, a daughter-in-law and eleven grandchildren collaborate in can picking. Last year the family cleared some $500, which Grandma naturally spent on the grandchildren...