Women TruckersAdriesue ("Bitsy") Gomez, 33, is a

"gear-jamming gal with white-line fe-ver." A woman truck driver from LosAngeles, she is also a pain in the axleto a traditionally macho industry. Herfledgling 150-member Coalition ofWomen Truck Drivers, an offshoot ofthe L.A. chapter of the National Or-ganization for.Women, already has or-ganization cells in Dallas, Atlanta- andcentral California. Two weeks ago, Go-mez won a $6,000 Fair Employment

JIM COLLISON

TRUCKER GOMEZ WIELDING A PUSH RODWhite-line fever and a macho world.

Practices Commission settlement froma California winery on the ground thatshe had been turned down for a truck-ingjob simply because she was a woman.

Bitsy is out to change the industry'straditional attitude toward female truck-ers. Some docking areas still have MENONLY signs, and many truck stops rou-tinely refuse to let women truckers usethe showers.Worse, saysGomez: "Whenyou lose your job to some 18-year-oldpunk boy after ten years, it makes youreal mad."

Bitsy has another major gripe.Women truckers, she says, often haveto pass a "sleeper test"-having sex witha foreman or male driver-to get a job.

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"I've had trucking foremen tell me notto frustrate the other driver or they'llget someone else to do the job as re-quired," she says. Archie Marietta, pres-ident ofTeamsters Local 208 inLos An-geles, says that he has never heard ofthe sleeper test. "But if Bitsy is a good-looking woman," he says, "I wouldn'tbe surprised if some drivers didn't tryto use it." To lessen chances for sexualharassment on the road, the coalition isdemanding separate rooms for male andfemale drivers on overnight stops, andrelay driving (with just one driver oneach stretch of the run). The coalition's

. other demands: on-the-job training forwomen; no special tests for drivers al-ready licensed in their categories by thestate (women truckers charge that thetests are used to weed out female ap-plicants) and adjustable seats and ped-als so women cannot be disqualified forbeing too small to drive a large truck.

Playing Hooky. The industry's ma-jor complaint about women is that theyare too weak, though few women truck-ers can be described as frail. SaysRogerKennedy, terminal manager for a gro-cery wholesaler: "We've been reluctantto hire women because the job involvesunloading heavy cases at Ma and Pa gro-cers. But Bitsy has sure got our atten-tion, and if we find a qualified woman,we'll be glad to hire her."

Gomez admits that she is a near fa-natic about trucking. As a girl in Chi-cago, she played hooky from school towatch truckers unload, and at drive-inmoviesshe usually watched the freewaysinstead ofthe films.The mother ofthree,she is separated from her husband, anddriving is the most important thing inher life. "A good truck is to a womanwhat a man ought to be," she says, "bigand strong and takes you where youwant to go. When a woman gets into asemi, it makes up for all the crap wom-en take in our society."

Secret LoveMore than 20,000 couples' will do

something furtive in California this year-they will marry. State law allows con-fidential marriages with a minimum offuss: no marriage license, no blood test,no three-day waiting period and, bestof all, no public record that the mar-riage ever took place.

The century-old statute was intend-ed to allow common-law couples to le-gitimize their marriages quietly andwithout embarrassment. Now growingnumbers of couples are using the law toavoid red tape and keep word of themarriages from parents and friends. In1972,only 532 such weddings were per-formed in Los Angeles County and ad-jacent Orange County. Last year it was12,212. .

"It's one of the greatest laws," says

Edie Steinmetz, owner of the Doves ofHappiness Wedding Chapel in Ingle-wood,a leader in the state's $700,000-a-year secret-marriage industry. "It allowsa lot of people to get married who oth-erwise would not be able to"-includ-ing the already married.

Couples fill in a confidential mar-riage form, which is filed with the coun-ty clerk and is then unavailable for in-spection by anyone. That makes it easyfor applicants intent on bigamy. SaysWilliam St. John, Orange County clerk:"There is nothing on the form that re-quires a couple to say how long theyhave been living together, if they had aprevious marriage or divorce, and if the

.divorce is finalized." •Dr. A.W. Morey, owner of the La-

fayette Wedding Chapel in Long Beach,shrugs off jhe bigamy problem and in-sists: "This is a very moral enterprise.We're trying to get the largest numberof people living together to come in andget married legally." Chapel owners arelegallyauthorized to preside at weddingsas long as they have some sort of min-isterial certificate, which in Californiais almost as easy to get as a secret wed-ding. Last year Dr. Morey, who says heis a minister, got 1,500couples to comein and marry, at $20per ceremony.

Blood Test. Since the confidentialweddings do not require proof of a bloodtest, some state officials are concernedabout increases in the incidence of ve-nereal disease and rubella during preg-nancies. State Assemblyman RobertBurke of Huntington Beach introduceda: bill last spring that would require a.blood test and a three-day waiting pe-riod for all marriages, but the weddingchapels lobbied hard against the bill andkilled it in committee. "Some of our cus-tomers may be frightened to death ofneedles," explains Steinmetz. Then, too,the tests would add to the cost of secretweddings, which usually run from $20to $50for a simple ceremony. Chapel op-erators also feared that a three-day waitwould send customers scurrying forquickie Las Vegasweddings.

Meanwhile, business is growing,partly because the chapels try so hardto please. Steinmetz has a stable of min-isters who carry paging devices so thathe can beep them in for quickie,wed-dings. Some chapels will perform theceremony wherever the customers wantit-on mountaintops or beaches, in sta-bles or even on rubber rafts. One cou-ple told Steinmetz's husband Joe, whohelps operate the Doves of Happiness,that they wanted to be married in thenude. "I asked them if they also wantedthe pastor nude," he says. "They saidthey had to discuss it. So far I haven'theard from them but I guess we coulddo it." He promptly beeped for the pas-tor, who called in and gamely said thathe toowas willing to perform in the buff.

TIME, APRIL26.1976

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