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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