10-4 Day Is All About Convoys and Old Home Bread Commercials

Breaker, one-nine, y'all. Sunday is National 10-4 day. It's the day we celebrate the CB Radio, C.W. McCall songs, and Old Home Bread TV commercials.

For some their introduction to CB radios came through movies like Smokey and the Bandit, TV shows like The Dukes of Hazzard, or songs like C.W. McCall's Convoy.

For others the introduction to CBs came by way of television commercials for Old Home Bread.

I know you're wondering what a commercial for Old Home Bread might have to do with CB Radios, so let me explain. Long before we had C.W. McCall's wonderful story-telling songs, we had a television commercial campaign that featured a truck driver and his sweetheart who worked at the Old Home Filler Up and Keep On Truckin' Cafe. Many's the night I convinced my parents to let me stay up past my bed time just to see if they would debut a new commercial during the weathercast.

Yup, they really were that entertaining. And hopefully they sold some bread.

The whole thing came about when advertising executive, Bill Fries, was tasked with coming up with a new concept to market Old Home Bread out of Sioux City, Iowa. That was in the early 1970s and CB radios were all the rage. He came up with the character and doing the voice work himself. This was back when the national speed limit was 55 miles per hour. Can you imagine how long it took to drive a cross country trip at 55 miles per hour?

Fries sat down and learned the CB lingo that the truckers were using, created the persona for Rubber Duck, and the whole thing went viral. Of course nobody new what the term 'viral' meant back in the day. From its humble beginnings as a series of TV commercials to sell bread the whole C.W. McCall story became a world-wide sensation.

Here's the very first Old Home Bread commercial, introducing us all to C.W. and Mavis.

You have a good weekend, we'll catch you on the flip flop.