The Road Gang

Six nights a week at 9:30, Charlie Douglas sounds two beeps on a truck horn, and thousands of truck drivers on the road all over the country cock an ear. For the next 7 1/2 hours, over WWL, a clear-channel New Orleans radio station at 870 on the dial, they can hear not only country music but business information that could be vital. Two years ago, Disc Jockey Douglas--who has never driven a truck, but was fascinated by the big rigs that rolled through his boyhood home of Ludowici, Ga. --sold WWL on an all-night program beamed specifically at truckers. His show, Charlie Douglas and the Road Gang, has won the loyalty of both listeners and advertisers by operating as a truckers' call board.

For the price of a postage stamp, a trucker can write to Douglas and get a special code number given only to the driver and the driver's wife and/or dispatcher. When there is a change in shipping plans or an emergency, the wife or dispatcher can call and have Douglas broadcast a message such as "Driver 508, please call in. You have the wrong load." Recently, for example, one driver who had been misdirected from Jacksonville to Houston was told to turn around and go to Baltimore instead. Douglas also broadcasts warnings, mostly phoned in by truckers, about collisions, closed highways, bad road conditions, and speed traps (like the one that long flourished, ironically, in Ludowici). The show logs 4,500 calls a month, nearly 85% of them long distance. Some request music. The most popular tune is Waitin' at the End of Your Run, which is usually requested not by truckers but by their wives.

To advertisers, Douglas delivers a specialized market. He estimates that his average listener, usually the owner and driver of his own truck, is in effect a businessman grossing $85,000 a year. The show sells $55,000 worth of advertising a month, 85% of it national, and the majority is sold to truck lines that broadcast their willingness to lease, say, ten trucks from owner-operators. Some large truck stops have also bought time. The Mass 10 truck stop near Boston took a month's advertising and increased diesel fuel sales from 150,000 gal. monthly to 500,000.

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