Episode 166 Show Notes

Old Truck Stop

1. Iowa 80, Walcott, Iowa Still Going— opened 1964 as a Standard Oil station, bought by the Moon family in 1984, still family-owned and still the world’s largest. Nine restaurants, a museum, a dentist. Never closed since day one.

2. Dixie Truckers Home, McLean, Illinois — the oldest truck stop in America, 1928, started as a sandwich counter in a mechanic’s garage on Route 66. Burned in 1965, rebuilt, sold out of the family in 2003, now a Road Ranger. The sign still says Dixie.

3. Bosselman Truck Plaza, Grand Island, Nebraska — 1965, billed as the “Truck Stop of Tomorrow.” Still going, fourth generation, and they invented the AmBest network of independent stops.

4. Jubitz Travel Center, Portland, Oregon — 1952, family-owned, never franchised. Movie theater, jacuzzis, a lounge with live country music. They even invented the DAT load board there.

5. Taylor’s State Line Truck Stop, Neelyville, Missouri — 1930, straddling the Missouri-Arkansas line on old 67. Still open, still 24 hours.

Gone:

6. Truckers Village, Oklahoma City — 1963, advertised as the largest truck stop in the world. Twelve acres, 57 pumps, a chapel built over a swimming pool. Died when self-service fuel killed the independent operators. The buildings are used-car lots now.

7. Te-Khi Travel Court, Battle Creek, Michigan — 1963, sheltered a hundred truckers during the 1978 blizzard. Bankruptcy reorganization since 2004, liquidated in 2010. A casino sits next door now.

8. Boondocks U.S.A., Williams, Iowa — 1973, family-run on I-35. Closed in 2018 when the owners retired. Iowans genuinely mourned it.

9. Tri-County Truck Stop, Gray Summit, Missouri — the old Diamonds restaurant on Route 66, reborn as a truck stop in 1971, serving a thousand drivers a day by 1979. Closed in 2006. The empty building’s now known for ghosts.

10. Big Tex Mid-Continent, Mesquite, Texas — the 1971 New York Times showcase stop. Ten acres, a motel, a barber shop, a doctor on call. Gone with the rest when the chains ate the independents.

The 76s were the biggest casualty of the whole era. Unocal sold the entire network in 1992 for a hundred and eighty million dollars to a group called National Auto/Truckstops, led by the Clipper Group — the same investors who bought Truckstops of America from BP the next year.

Then in 1997, National Auto/Truckstops merged with Truckstops of America and became TravelCenters of America. That’s when the 76 signs came down. Some of those old 76 sites are still TA locations today — the Davy Crockett in Tennessee converted to a TA franchise in 2007 and kept a lot of its original character.

The brand itself bounced around after that — Tosco bought it in 1997, Phillips Petroleum in 2001, ConocoPhillips in 2002, then Phillips 66 spun it off in 2012. But the truck stop network was already gone by then.

TA’s own story is just as tangled. Phil Saunders founded it in 1972 as Truckstops of America, Ryder bought it that same year, Standard Oil of Ohio took it in 1984, BP sold it to Clipper in 1993, then the 1997 merger with National Auto/Truckstops created TA. BP bought it back in 2023 for one point three billion.