Saying he was an unusual trucker is an understatement. 
By Advance Business Capital 

Farewell to Tim Costello: Trucker, Author, Icon and Iconoclast
It's not often that a truck driver's death is noted with a long write-up in the national news section of the New York Times, but such was the case in late December with the passing of Tim Costello, 64. Costello, a man who defied categories and expectations, was a lifelong friend and advocate for the interests of the little guy. Born into a working-class family in Boston, he never forgot where he came from, though he had friends from all walks of life, including writers, academics and politicians. He drove trucks for more than 30 years.

Costello was a high school graduate who wrote scholarly books and articles on labor and globalization, a self-educated intellectual in the tradition of American iconoclasts such as the prominent author and philosopher Eric Hoffer, who was also a career longshoreman. Hoffer once remarked that America’s working class was “lumpy with talent.” Costello was one of its more golden lumps.

A quietly passionate, genial man, Costello seemed to see things differently from those around him. He began his career in social advocacy and trucking at about the same time, in the mid-sixties when he was both a college student and truck driver. Enrolled at the New School in New York, Costello joined the leftist Students for a Democratic Society, better known as the SDS, which organized public protests for Civil Rights and against the Vietnam War. At the same time, he was making a living as a driver for Metropolitan Petroleum.

The SDS, though a bugaboo of the FBI and conservative newspapers, practiced largely peaceful protest marches that featured harmless hyperbolic rhetoric with quotes from Karl Marx, chants against LBJ and patronizing class solidarity with working stiffs. Costello was a working stiff who had read and admired Marx but not Communism. He opposed Vietnam but admired LBJ’s strong stand on Civil Rights and social action. He was an original, nuanced thinker with greasy hands who did not fit in well with middle-class children who went on to middle-class careers. He later transferred to Goddard College, but dropped out in 1971 to continue life as a trucker.

An old classmate recalled of Costello, "Unlike most of us, Tim was both an active SDS member and an actual blue-collar worker. He believed deeply in the union movement and the possibilities for working people to change the social order." He drove trucks for a living, not as a political statement. Costello’s friend Jeremy Brecher recalls that as a trucker, “Tim worked an incredible number of hours, often twelve to fourteen a day, six or seven days a week.”

Costello also worked as a seasonal lobsterman. Although a member of the Teamster’s Union, he was an active and influential critic of union corruption. When asked how he was so often successful at persuading people to his point of view, he drew on his marine experience, “You’ve got to know where people are coming from. If you’re going to be a successful lobsterman, you have to think like a lobster.”

Costello’s first book, Common Sense for Hard Times, was about the effect of the 1970s recession on young workers. It was written with historian Jeremy Brecher, his long-time coauthor and friend. He and Brecher later wrote Building Bridges: The Emerging Grassroots Coalition of Labor and Community (1990); Global Village or Global Pillage: Economic Reconstruction from the Bottom Up (1994); and Globalization from Below: The Power of Solidarity (2000).

Costello later became a long-haul driver. He traveled on highways through every state in the union and had a small office in the back of his rig for reading and writing. "We called him Cosmic Tim because he seemed to be everywhere in the universe," recalled labor historian James Green of the University of Massachusetts. "He’d trucked everywhere and read nearly everything."

Costello’s well-thumbed home library included works by Jean-Paul Satre, Homer, Aristotle and numerous books on Zen Buddhism. Janice Fine, a friend of Tim and his wife Susanne, said "Tim had been everywhere, done everything, but had an understated way about him.” Agreed Brecher, “He usually knew more than anyone in the room but he was often the quietest.”

Indeed, with his dusty shock of hair and gray, push broom mustache and open, amiable smile he looked like the kindly woodcarver Geppetto in Walt Disney’s Pinocchio. It took being "brave, truthful and unselfish" for Pinocchio to become a real boy, and in a sense that's how Tim Costello lived his life.  Well-informed, yet not a rigid ideologue, he believed globalization did not have to result in a "race to the bottom" for American workers or those abroad.

Tim Costello was a trucker, lobsterman, environmentalist, social activist, author, iconoclastic thinker and in what he considered the highest praise of all, a "normal person."

This story was drawn from Tim Costello’s obituary in The New York Times, “In Memory of Tim Costello” in Global Labor Strategies, “Forty Years with Tim” by Jeremy Brecher in Global Labor Strategies and Costello’s official biography on the website of his publisher, Sound End Press.

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