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A Museum for Those Heroes of the Lonely Road
January 20, 2002
By KEVIN SACK
CHATTANOOGA, Tenn., Jan. 17 - Lyndia Thomas may well have
to clear some wall space to honor the heroes of Sept. 11.
Not the firefighters or police officers. Not the passengers
on United Airlines Flight 93. Praising them will fall to
others. Ms. Thomas will be satisfied if she can find a
proper way to commemorate men like Anthony Lisi of Lisi's
Recovery and Towing Service in Brewster, N.Y., who took his
55-ton tri-axle drop-deck hydraulic trailer to ground zero,
knowing that it would be perfect for short- radius turning
in Lower Manhattan.
As it is, there is little room left at the International
Towing and Recovery Hall of Fame and Museum in downtown
Chattanooga, not with the portraits of 275 inductees
already on the walls. Whatever the accomplishments of Mr.
Lisi and others like him, they cannot displace industry
stalwarts like Arden Bowman Sr. (Class of 1995), a beloved
Nashville tow truck operator who chose to be photographed
while chomping on the stub of a stogie, or Jean J. Julien
(Class of 1998), a tuxedo-clad Frenchman who pioneered the
use of small recovery vehicles in Paris.
But Ms. Thomas promises that the contributions of the Sept.
11 tow truck drivers will not be overlooked. Evangelizing
for the towing industry, after all, has been the museum's
mission since its founding in 1995.
"A lot of times," she said, "the men and women of the
industry are the unsung heroes of the nation, really of the
world. People don't realize they risk their lives daily to
help stranded motorists."
Ms. Thomas hopes to ensure that the children of the Sept.
11 tow truck drivers understand the role that their parents
played in clearing the path for rescue workers. She is
soliciting stories and photographs for the museum archives.
"We don't want people to forget," she said.
For generations, Ms. Thomas said, the media have depicted
tow truck drivers in a negative light. "They've always got
overalls on and are chewing tobacco and spitting in a cup,"
she said. "Maybe 5 percent of the industry might be people
like that, people out to make a buck who are going to rip
you off. The rest are just people out to make a living."
Ms. Thomas has little patience with those ill-tempered
red-zone parkers and drunken drivers who take out their
frustrations on America's tow truck drivers.
"You're the one that broke the law," she said. "It's not
the tower's fault. Why yell and scream at them? They're
just professionals out there doing their job, like the
firefighters and the police and the emergency medical
technicians."
That said, Ms. Thomas seems to understand her market. It is
not every museum shop, after all, that sells T-shirts in
size XXXXXL.
There is a reason, of course, that the museum is in
Chattanooga. It was here that a local man, Ernest Holmes
Sr., manufactured the first twin-boom wrecker in 1916.
Cable from the extra boom could be tied off to a tree or
boulder, making the truck more stable while the other cable
lifted a vehicle out of a ditch. These days, the twin-boom
has been replaced by more powerful hydraulic single-boom
trucks. The world's largest manufacturer, Miller
Industries, is outside town, in Ooltewah.
To walk the heavily waxed checkerboard linoleum in the
museum, as 10,000 visitors do annually, is to know an
industry's pride. Seventeen trucks are on display, lent by
their owners and in mint condition. Ms. Thomas has pet
names for most, referring to them with masculine pronouns.
There is the Locomobile, a 1913 truck with a 1919 Holmes
485 wrecker apparatus that is insured for $200,000. There
is a United States Army Diamond-T wrecker that was used in
World War II. And then there is Bubblenose, or Bubba, a
1947 truck that arrived at the museum with some fanfare.
"They backed him up the ramp," said Ms. Thomas, daughter of
a longtime worker at the Ernest Holmes Company, "and the
brakes failed, and he came flying down the ramp, knocked
out two windows, fell on Sonny Griffin's car and smashed
it."
The museum also features magnificently preserved towing
hooks, flares and blinking lights, hundreds of toy wreckers
and a photograph of the largest towing operation ever tried
- pulling a 177-ton excavator off a South African roadside.
That job took five tow trucks and two bulldozers, according
to Ms. Thomas.
The archive holds complete sets of The American Towman and
The Tow Times magazines. The bookstore offers "World's
Greatest Tow Trucks" and "Knights in Shining Tow Trucks."
Ms. Thomas conceded that the museum board had not always
been particularly selective. "The first two years they got
carried away and inducted anybody that was nominated," she
said. Now the board limits its choices to six Americans and
two foreigners a year. They must be industry leaders and
good family men.
Ms. Thomas said that visitors poke one another in the ribs
when they spot the handsome brick museum while strolling
down Broad Street, usually on the way to better-known
attractions like the Tennessee Aquarium. But she said she
had had just one unsatisfied customer, a French woman who
was dragged along by her tow trucking husband.
"He stayed for six hours," she said. "We're only open
seven. After the first hour, she was just steaming. She
shook her leg a lot. But it didn't matter. He looked at
every vehicle."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/20/national/20TOWI.html?ex=1012545506&ei=1&en=236ca99437f5084a
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