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Welcome to the Charlie's Truck Stop page. Charlie's is something of a departure for the Tandra site in that, for over a quarter century, Tandra has been about heroic escapist sci-fi fantasy on another world. Charlie's is the exact opposite in that Charlie's Truck Stop is about real people in real time in a small country store right here on Earth. Charlie's Truck Stop evolved from a weekly commentary Tim Spencer of Rock103 in Memphis TN asked me to do for the radio station web site. About six months later, Andy Friedman of Clear Channel asked if I would consider having the weekly commentary available to 1200 Clear Channel radio station sites across the country. Neither Tim Spencer nor Andy Friedman has ever made any suggestions nor have they placed any restrictions on what I can write about. They have not even said my commentaries should be family friendly, though I have made that assumption on my own based upon the audience implied.

The Charlie's pages came about because Jake Williams, who owns Charlie's, is aware of my work with computers and web sites and asked me to do some work for him. I decided to write about the experience because I thought it interesting. Over time I wrote about the folks who come into Charlie's as incidents came up I thought worth telling. Response has been uniformly favorable.

With the increase in the backlog of Charlie's Essays, an idea was planted in my head that I could make the reports available for anyone interested by placing them on my Tandra site. No sooner had that idea occured than it seemed a wise suggestion to increase the frequency of the Charlie's Reports.

I have, in consequence, negotiated with our hometown newspaper, The Daily Corinthian, to have a Charlie's piece appear in the paper each Sunday. I had the thought that, as my writing was available to readers of Clear Channel radio station sites nationwide, I should allow my friends and neighbors, those without computers, to sample my reports. Of course Jake Williams lets me know on a regular basis his opinion of my reports of the goings on at his store.

With the commitment to writing Charlie's in weekly installments, the list of archived reports is becoming quite lengthy. To minimize the list, I have compiled the first seventy Charlie's reports into convenient PDF documents. You can download these free PDF files by clicking the Charlie's Vol 1, Charlie's Vol 2, Charlie's Vol 3, Charlie's Vol 4 or Charlie's Vol 5 under Charlie's In PDF in the upper right of this page. I will have more Charlie's compilations in the near future. We hope you continue to enjoy the reports of the guys at Charlie's.

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 Charlie's In PDF

Charlie's Reports