You might be from Tonkawa if you’ve ever used the “upside down” semi near 1-35 as a direction reference. I found an interesting internet article from 2014 about the history! Writer : MJ Alexander. Hope you enjoy!The nose-down semi is off I-35, the state’s main northsouth artery, which slices dead through the center of Oklahoma on its 1,568-mile run from Lake Superior south to the Rio Grande. On an average day, 17,500 vehicles pass the site off Exit 211, south of Tonkawa. More than 6 million each year. Hundreds of thousands of them are long-haul truckers.Clint Wilkins used to be one of them. In 1987, after nearly 25 years on the road, he and his son set up a truck parts and repair shop off the interstate. To promote the venture, they bought space on billboards, facing north and south. Cost: $22,000 a year.But before long, they had a better idea. Why not make their own sign? Wilkins has worked by the motto: “You got to be different. That’s what Elvis Presley said.”So he took an eight-ton ’72 Kenworth and rented a crane to dangle it upside down. He anchored the truck’s hood in 11 feet of concrete, running three 20-inch pipes, each 40 feet long, up through the cab and the length of the rig. The pipes were welded to a 2-inch plate, which was bolted to the concrete bed set deep into the Oklahoma clay.The lettering on the side, once a bright red, declares: GOT PROBLEMS? OKLAHOMA TRUCK SUPPLY. The top of the trailer reads WE FIX TRUCKS. Total cost for the materials and installation: $8,000.“We didn’t know if it’d last the first storm,” said his son, Brett Wilkins.Twenty-eight years later, it’s still standing.The five-story-tall rig – which has now spent far more time in the ground than it did on the road – stands solid in the open field north of the shop. For 10,000 dawns, the truck has served as a giant sundial, its shadow extending long across the lanes of traffic to the west, contracting as the sun climbs, and then reaching to the eastern horizon as the sun sets. Its fading lettering takes care of business, posing its existential question to travelers speeding across the prairie.A tornado has come within a mile of the site, which has been battered by straight-line winds that crumpled road signs on the interstate.“Two or three years ago, there ...
