I was walking through the garage the other day and caught a glimpse of my hand-truck, or as some people call them, a dolly. It is a small metal framework on two wheels, easy to convert from a vertical hand-truck for moving big boxes around or to a roll-around platform for moving bigger boxes around. It is about three-quarters of the size of a professional dolly used by furniture movers.
Seeing it over in the corner of the garage brought back a flood of memories, the many times I have used it to move furniture, carry big potted plants from one side of the yard to the other, and even bales of pine straw. But its first and most famous use, back when I first bought it in the early 1980's (yes, it's 44 years old), was to move large heavy cases full of blank audio cassette tapes and extremely heavy tape duplication equipment.
I don't remember where I bought it, but having just gotten a job recording speeches at national conferences, I soon learned that I couldn't haul around the recording and duplicating equipment, plus the several cases of blank audio cassettes, on my own. The hand truck dolly came to my rescue.
I usually drove to conference locations that were within driving distance, using the dolly to haul the big cases and crates to the car and back, and to the hotel conference rooms and back. My dolly had a place all of its own in my car on those trips to Dallas, San Antonio, Houston, and Mobile On the small number of airline flights to my conference locations I was pleased to find I could use it to carry my equipment cases into the airport and off-load them directly to the baggage handlers.
I was even more pleasantly surprised on one flight when the baggage handler asked me if I wanted to ship the dolly as well, and I said, "Sure, if that's possible." We folded it up, put a tag on it, and off it went together with the cases. It would come in handy on the other end of the flight when I had to manhandle all that stuff into my destination hotel. That sure came in handy when I flew off to places like Disney World and Los Angeles.
The job requirements were relatively easy after that: (1) get out and place the two or three professional tape recorders to record the concurrent sessions, including the placement of microphones, (2) make sure I didn't interfere with the Public Address System (3) start the recorders when the speech started, (4) flip the cassettes over when necessary (running from room to room on a pretty tight schedule), and then (3) setting up the huge high-speed duplication machines to make audio cassette copies of the speech just presented so people could buy them as they came out of the room where the speech had just been given.
And my dolly helped make it all possible.
Once I spent two weeks back to back in San Antonio, TX, recording speeches at two separate conventions, one after the other, in two separate hotel conference centers. My dolly kept busy moving the equipment cases back and forth from room to room as sessions changed locations. And in-between conferences, recorded cassettes that didn't sell had to be shipped back to the main office in Los Angeles, and incoming cases full of blank cassettes had to be retrieved from either the airport or the hotel storage room.
The logistics of having two conferences one after another meant running like a mad man from room to room. After every speech I had to duplicate the tapes as quickly as possible for immediate sale. I was exhausted by the end of the day. I almost wished someone would put me on the hand-truck and wheel me back to my hotel room where I could collapse.
Anyway, since that job, the little hand-truck has come in handy many times, moving furniture and a variety of other items. I've lost various pieces of it along the way: the small wheels at the top that convert it into a platform are no longer there, and the garbage bag frame that makes it into a stand-alone garbage can has disappeared. But it is still doing its job of moving heavy items from place to place when I need it. The older I get, the more I appreciate what it can do. The items I use it to move from one place to the other have gotten lighter and lighter over the years, but that's only because the older I get, the less inclined I am to carry heavy things around if I can avoid it.
So there's the story of me and my dolly. I paid about 20 dollars for it 44 years ago. It's surely been worth it.
