Candy Bass has been a fixture ....
Candy Bass is a constant ...
Candy Bass, whose name for many years now has graced the truck stop here in Nashville that is the closest of any stop to where I live ...
It's been hard for me to settle on just how to begin this story, intended simply to publicly congratulate a woman whose presence has been a veritable constant in my mind since, it certainly feels like, the very day I started out with Overdrive in November of 2006. Truthfully, I can't remember where and when I met Candy Bass for the first time, but a quick search of Overdrve's archives puts the date before or in 2010, when she was marshaling an effort to collect donations of hats for military servicemembers at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio via Fort Sam Houston’s Army Community Services office. That program was known simply as "Hats for Heroes," well into its fourth or fifth year by then. And it was but one of the charitable efforts Bass helped move along throughout her long and successful career, then as an operator with Marten Transport.
As independent owner-operator Howard Salmon put it then, describing Bass: “When there’s something ever that needs to be done, she’s one of the first to be helping. She’ll give the shirt off her back to help anybody -- she loves trucking, and she loves the truckers.”
Candy Bass, pictured at that time in 2010, with a hat of her own.Courtesy of Candy Bass
The trucking community and the organizations and companies that support it, has been on a run of paying that back to her in recent years. Bass was a a Citizen Driver honoree in TA Petro's program in 2016, whereupon her name went up on the Nashville truck stop that bore it from that time on. The day that truck stop opened its doors for the final time this past Friday, Bass was in Louisville, Kentucky, to accept Driver of the Year honors from the Women in Trucking group at a Mid-America Trucking Show event.
