The mid-1970s saw a craze for citizens band radio, which allowed long-haul truck drivers to communicate the whereabouts of state police speed traps and evade enforcement of the 55-mile-an-hour speed limits imposed in the wake of the 1973 Arab oil embargo. It was by CB that truckers communicated when, in December of that year, J. W. “River Rat” Edwards started a nationwide “blockade” outside Lamar, Pennsylvania, to protest gas prices and highway regulation. The slang the truckers used to disguise their identities (for they were breaking the law) was romanticized in the film Smokey and the
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