Chicken Lights on Trucks

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, Martha. This is Jim Sobeck.

Hi, Jim.

In McCordsville, Indiana, which is a bedroom community out on the northeast side of Indianapolis.

Okay.

Okay. Welcome.

What can we help you with?

Well, I do accident reconstruction work for an engineering firm, and many of the cases I get involve lighting and visibility. In fact, people ask me what I do in my work, and I say, oh, I play in traffic in the dark.

Okay.

And that’s pretty much what I do. A lot of my work is involving nighttime visibility issues. Many of the cases involve heavy trucks. And every so often we will get a truck that has this string of yellow or amber lights all along the side. You’ve probably seen them. They’re really, really highly decorated. They’re almost always a privately owned truck, what we refer to as owner-operators.

And there’s a jargon term that I was writing into a report the other day, and I put it in quotes. Those lights are called chicken lights, just like the bird. And I thought, where did that term come from? I asked a few people that I know who are in the trucking industry, and they didn’t know. They just know that’s what they’re called. I did a little online research and couldn’t find the origin, and so I thought, I know who I’ll call.

So you want to know why these bright lights decorating tractor trailer rigs are called chicken lights?

Yes. They’re always amber lights, and they may be all across the front and the sides, never on the back.

Okay. Because I’ve done the same kind of deep dive on the Internet that you did. And also, I talked to my sister in Missouri. She’s a dispatcher for a trucking company there. And I had her ask some of the drivers and the people in the office. And this is a, there’s such a culture of driving and drivers and trucking in this country. It’s one of the most common professions, actually, is truck driving. I thought for sure she’d come up with something. And the only thing that she could come up with was the same thing that I found on looking online, which has something to do with the drivers who used to drive only chickens.

Did you hear that? Did you see that?

I did not run across that. I suspected it, but I couldn’t think of any reason why that particular part of the culture would decide on those kinds of lights.

All right, so I pieced it together from some comments from people who’ve been driving since the 70s and a couple newspaper articles. And the theory that I have, and this is just a theory, is it has to do with Frank Perdue, as in Perdue Chickens. In the early 1970s and the mid-1970s, he started this series of radio commercials featuring Gene Clavin, who was a WNEW radio personality in New York, doing the voice of a truck driver called The Hard Driver. And the whole idea was in these radio commercials was that Purdue chickens were rushed to market at super speed. So they were absolutely fresh and da-da-da. And you knew you were getting high quality product, right?

But the other thing there, the other part, this is where the penny dropped for me, was that somebody swears in one of these discussion forums that Frank Purdue insisted that his drivers put brightly colored yellow lights on the front of the vehicles. And therefore, they were very recognizable on the road. And you would know that that was a Purdue truck either hauling frozen chickens or live chickens.

Interesting.

Yeah.

I think we have worked on cases involving Purdue.

Yeah. And I might be able to find somebody within that corporation and actually have them go back and figure that out.

Yeah, you want to look probably early 70s, maybe 74 through 78, something like that. That’s the data that I found. The best place to talk about this, by the way, is the forums of the American Truck Historical Society. And if that name doesn’t give you shivers, you’re not a true American. It makes me want to stand up and salute.

Thank you for bringing me my stuff.

Yeah, right? There’s a bunch of real fun guys having goofy conversations about the inside business of being a driver. It’s really cool. But they talk about this, and I read so many pages of this to try to piece that story together for you. But I want to leave you, Jim, with one more theory, which is a lot simpler. And you know this show, and you know that the simple theories are usually the right ones, right?

That’s correct, yes.

The theory is that the amber lights that are wildly decorating these trucks look a lot like the lights that keep chickens warm.

Oh.

That’s it. Some people are just saying it’s nothing more complicated than the amber lights. They look like the heat lamps that you put over chicks.

Oh, I thought you were going to say.

That makes a whole lot of sense.

Yeah. I thought you were going to say they look like yolks. That’s what I’ve been thinking the whole time.

No, they do. They look a lot, but they’re smaller, but the color is about the same as a heat lamp, some varieties of heat lamp, right?

They are, yes.

My brother used to catch chickens as a summer job, and they had these lamps in the coops.

Oh.

And they were amber?

They were amber, yes.

That’s cool.

There you go. Well, here’s what we’re going to do, Jim. Obviously, a lot of our listeners are going to call us and email us with their ideas on this. But if you do talk to the people at Purdue, I insist that you call us back and tell us what they said, all right?

I will absolutely do that. I love this show, and I know that there have got to be a lot of truckers in the industry who listen to it, because when you’re on the road, it gets pretty boring just listening to the CB.

We know they listen. They call us and email us. They listen on podcast. And they said, I had to pull over to ask you this question.

Outstanding.

Thanks, Jim.

Take care now.

Bye, Jim.

Thank you very much.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

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