![]() ![]() We literally didn’t have time to put the 66-inch tires on the truck and try it out. ‘I was having a difficult time steering the truck during that competition,’ he says. tires on USA-1 for first time ever at the track right before the event. The project came up so fast, Jasmer put 1,000-lb., 66-in. They wanted a race that would be somewhat competitive.Įverett Jasmer, left, and Bob Chandler, far right, after their 1983 appearance on the TV show ‘That’s Incredible!’, where they raced to crush some 50 cars. For the show, there was going to be 50-something cars in a row for us to each drive over. They’re massive things-thousand-pound tires. I had just a few weeks to get the truck rebuilt and get the 66-inch tires on so we could compete on the show.Ĭhandler: We had just stepped up to the 66-inch tires and our trucks weren’t really set up for that size tire. He called me one day and told me about the TV show and I wasn’t ready. I was getting ready to put them on my truck. ![]() Jasmer: By 1983 Bob had another opportunity-to do the “That’s Incredible!” show. From that point on, whenever I went anywhere, people wanted to see the truck drive over cars. ![]() The promoter kept bugging me and I says, “Okay, we’ll try it one time.” It was in Jefferson City, Missouri. We’ve tried to put a good clean name on our truck, a family-oriented kind of thing. We videotaped that.Ĭhandler: A promoter saw this video and he says, “I want you to do that in front of a crowd.” My wife Marilyn and I thought, well, that’s destructive. We took the truck there and I drove over cars without a problem. My employee Jim Kramer was with me and I says, “You know, Bigfoot would drive clean over a car.” So he set it up with one of his friends on a farm. There was a body of a car in the mud, sticking up six inches out of the ground, and this Toyota put its front tires on it. 'That’s Incredible!'Ĭhandler: One Saturday morning I was watching “Wide World of Sports” on TV when I saw trucks driving around a muddy area. There were 68,000 people there, all going crazy. ![]() One promoter at an event at the Pontiac Silverdome outside Detroit called Bigfoot a monster truck, and that’s where the name comes from. We both crawled out of the mud and became monster truckers in the early 1980s.Ĭhandler: Once I started getting paid to bring Bigfoot to events, it changed things completely. We continued to build our trucks bigger and bigger. Jasmer: It was an incredible opportunity, and after that, we were getting a lot of invitations to events around the country. The first opportunity he brought to me was an involvement in the movie Take This Job and Shove It. Jasmer: Bob had a much bigger operation than me and he had people working on promotional and media types of things. I got ahold of Everett, and he brought two trucks. Then I got a call and he says, “We need you in Dubuque, Iowa, in two weeks.” I had to get everything ready. When he hung up he didn’t leave me a phone number and I didn’t hear from him for a year. He wanted to know if I’d be interested in putting my truck in his movie. He saw a picture of my truck in a magazine. Take This Job and Shove ItĬhandler: I got a call from Greg Blackwell, a movie producer. It all started with a phone ringing in Chandler’s shop in 1979. The friendship between Chandler and Jasmer was about to spawn a national phenomenon and a billion-dollar industry. He put the plate on his 1970 truck and from then on, that was its name.Īt the time, there was no such thing as a monster truck. Jasmer had one hanging on the wall in his den. In the 1960s, Chevrolet had created red, white and blue license plates for their pickup trucks as a marketing campaign, with “USA-1” on them. He recalls having “a vision” while mowing his lawn. Like Chandler, Jasmer had named his truck. His ride was a 1970 Chevy K-10 that he bought used in 1974.īigfoot #1 was a modified 1974 Ford F-250 that began its career at local mud runs and truck and tractor pulls. One difference: Chandler’s truck was a Ford, while Jasmer, then 27, was a hardcore Chevy guy. Both had four-wheel-drive shops, and both were trying to build the biggest and best truck, so they could promote aftermarket truck parts for their small businesses. In the summer of 1979, Chandler, then 38 years old, met Everett Jasmer, a former drag racer and fellow truck fan, at a four-wheeling event in Minnesota. “I thought, God,” he recalls, “it’d be great to get paid for a change.” One day a promoter called, offering to pay Chandler if he would bring Bigfoot to a local event. They called him Bigfoot, so he painted the name on the side of his truck, a 1974 Ford F-250 he had purchased new. It was a vicious cycle.” Friends joked that Chandler liked to press hard on the accelerator. “I had a pickup truck that I put product on,” he recalls. In the late 1970s, Bob Chandler was just another car guy, the owner of Midwest Four Wheel Drive Center in St. ![]()
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