Transportation

            While sitting on his couch, his face filled with joy and excitement, the 78 year old Edward Yousefzadeh, , had no idea how amazing his life has been. He was born a Christian of the Assyrian race in Iraq, and moved to Iran at the age of 6. He married at the age of 33, and worked as a truck driver for most of his lifetimes, until a tragic accident caused him to lose his leg. At the age of 60 he still managed to live through the hard times and moved his family to America. Edward has been near cars his entire life time, and cars change the course of his life, for better and for worse. As he was sitting and flipping through old pictures of himself and father, he maybe realized the role cars played on his life and remembered the times of being a trucker in Iran.

When I was a little boy, traveling was very hard, they traveled mostly with mules when I was a baby, and later when there were cars the roads were in horrible condition and it took a long time, for example, to travel. It took 5 to 6 days to travel from Tehran to Rash. Now from Tehran to Rash..3 hours.. four hours. From Tabriz  it took us two days to get to Tehran, two complete days, now it takes 12 hours, the roads have gotten much better. I’m talking about trucks not cars.

            The first time I sat in an airplane.. I was 22 or 23 years old. I went from Tabriz to Tehran…. The airplanes were very small, very small it had two propellers … and it carried 40 maybe 50 people. We were in the air for a few hours. It was a very good airplane, 2   propellers, then it got bigger and had 4 propellers, and day by day they got better and the jets came and that kind of stuff.. They added many flights then. The planes were comftorble and I was fascinated, they were different. I rode trains as well. I rode a train for the first time when we started to transport materials, one day we wanted to come from Mashad to Tehran with a plane, but the weather was cold and icy and the plane couldn’t land, so we had to take the train. I was about 28 to 30 years old back then, when we went from Mashad to Tehran with the train. The weather was very bad, it was snowing a lot and the train moved really slowly. I rode a modern train in germany, .. I was about 58 to 60 years old. Germany had really good transportation. Very fast and efficient. , The difference was that the handling speed was much higher, much smoother very clean. It had good restaurants too, back then it wasn’t this fast and fancy.

            The first car that I saw was a Buick. It was my dads, that he bought in 1961. We used it a lot. We used it for traveling and moving within the city. And my dad did agricultural work and traveled to small towns. There was nothing there, no tape player, no radioactually there was a radio. But it was very empty, it was very small. Its way different now. The old cars had very small engines. They were very slow, And only three or four people fit in the car. It was very small back then. There was no asphalt roads back then in Iran. The roads were made out of dirt. The cars were often were broken and left in the road. It wasn’t like the car can have much movement. But things got better the roads improved, the cars got faster. At first we had old tires on the trucks, but later they were no problems involving that.

            towards the end, I got in an accident near Yazd and I lost my right leg, and from that point on I couldn’t drive anymore, and there were no automatic transmission cars for me to drive. never drove again in the next five years until Germany. I can easily drive now, Any car, you name it I can drive it. Big, small, as long as its automatic. And I’m very comfortable.

            My father also drove a graham truck. I started working with cars at the year of 1948. I started when my dad had a garage when he bought cars from the Americans after the war. My dad stopped driving so I took over for him. it was very hard, The roads were terrible, The loads were heavy, the trucks were heavy, they worked very slowly. We had a lot of hard times but Life was easy financially, we made good money.  Before the Mosandegh era we earned 26 Tomans but after he came it raised to 300! Not many people owned trucks and the ones that did had it made.

As cars got better and faster, life in our family got better and easier, because our jobs involved cars, and because the money was good for that business.