Less than ten minutes after the jovial Oklahoma City Hells Angels Club member dropped me off on the breakdown lane near the exit in Oklahoma City, where he was leaving the Interstate 44 highway with his car, a pick-up truck, driven by a white teenage guy, stopped. The passenger sitting next to the pick-up truck driver, another white teenage guy, then called out to me through the open passenger side window: "We're driving up to Illinois through St. Louis, if you think that might help you."
"It sure would, since I'm trying to get to Indianapolis," I replied.
"Then just hop-in outside in the back. And we can drop you off when we turn off in St. Louis," the white teenage passenger said.
After thanking the two teenage guys for offering me the ride, I quickly climbed up onto the back of their pick-up truck with my knapsack and sat outside there, watching the Oklahoma countryside before and after the pick-up truck drove rapidly through Tulsa; and, after the pick-up truck crossed the Oklahoma-Missouri border, watched the rural Missouri landscape alongside Interstate 44 from the pick-up truck, as it moved northeast towards St. Louis, until we finally reached that city in the early evening darkness.
Being outside in the back of the pick-up truck, which stopped neither for refueling at a gas station or at any fast food joint or restaurant before it reached St. Louis, I did not converse at all with either the teenage guy who was driving the pick-up truck or with the teenage guy who was his passenger. So I didn't learn much about where they were at philosophically or exactly where in Illinois they were heading up to.
Both of the white teenage guys looked pretty straight culturally, were beardless and had short-hair. So they apparently were the teenage sons of some white farmers in some rural Illinois area north of St. Louis, who were driving back from either making some delivery they had made in Oklahoma, Arkansas or Texas or from some vacation or weekend trip to ones of these three states.
Since they didn't look like hippies or freaks themselves, in the same way that I looked like a hippie or freak, and didn't appear to be smoking pot when they picked me up, the main reason they probably felt it was their natural role to offer hitchhikers like me who were on the road a free lift was that, in the 1970s, most white people in the USA who grew up or lived on farms in rural areas were generally still socialized to always pick up white hitchhikers they saw on the road.
In rural areas of states like Oklahoma, Missouri and Oklahoma, nearly all teenage guys who grew up on farms in rural areas were driving at 15 or 16 and had their own cars (or access to a car) by that age; and people who grew up on farms in rural areasa of the USA in the 1970s were still generally friendlier, less suspicious and more helpful in relationship to each other than those teenagers who had grown up in urban or suburban areas and not on farms.
In addition, since living without a car in Midwestern rural farming communities was probably still considered to be almost as much of a misfortune as if a person had no access to food, in the 1970s, the teenage white guys who drove me northeast to St. Louis in the early 1970s probably felt that only neurotically cruel or weird teenage drivers who had empty space outside in the back of their pick-up trucks would drive by any individual white hitchhiker on the road, without offering him or her a lift. Because of the racist way the institutionally racist U.S. corporate media newspapers and tv stations stilll generally portrayed African-American people in the 1970s, however, culturally-straight teenage white guys, like the ones who picked me up in Oklahoma, likely would still tend not pick up any individual African-American hitchhiker on the road in the same way in the 1970s; unless the individual African-American hitchhiker on the road was wearing a U.S. military uniform.
By the time we reached St. Louis, the pick-up truck also needed to have its tank filled-up with more gasoline. So before heading further towards Illinois in a more northeastern direction from St. Louis, the teenage guys got off Interstate Highway 44 and drove a few miles east on the St. Louis city streets until they reached the nearest St. Louis gas station. And at the St. Louis gas station, I jumped out of the rear of their pick-up truck, thanked them again for the ride and wished them luck and said "goodbye" to them, just before they started driving their pick-up truck back out of the gas station and resumed their journey back to rural Illinois.
