ROAD WARRIORS : When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Towing

In the land where everybody drives, everybody needs a tow. And that means you need a tow-truck driver, a Southern California fixture as ubiquitous as traffic and palm trees.

Though there are tow-truck drivers around the world, nowhere does the job security compare with this largest car- and truck-purchasing state in the union, where 26 million vehicles were registered last year.

“With all these cars,” said Marvin Swan, waving out the window of his bouncing rig toward the San Diego Freeway at rush hour, “I’ve always got a job, as long as people love their cars as much as they do here.”

And despite rainfall’s reputation for havoc, the heat of summer causes its own kind of commuting chaos and foul mood. As August blistered in with a vengeance, calls to the Automobile Club of Southern California were as high as 27% above normal. The roadside service company counts 43% of Southern California households as members.

The winter brings flooding, crashes and flat tires; the summer brings overheated engines, drivers frazzled or hurrying to escape hot cars and forgetting their keys--and flat tires. Day one of a heat wave--as with rain--is usually the worst. In four hours Monday, tow-truck driver Chris Jennings went through 10 gallons of water, all of it poured into vehicles along a four-mile stretch of the San Diego Freeway in Costa Mesa.

“When it’s hot, you get grumpier people. You get a driver who stays in the car while you change their tire, and the window comes down a little bit--’Thanks’--and then it goes back up,” Jennings, 29, said with a grin as he steered back into the 5 o’clock crawl. “And that’s fine. It’s my job to change the tire.”

Tow-truck drivers see a parade of human behavior as the crunched Gremlins, smoking Explorers and other four-wheel carcasses get hitched up and hauled off. They drive and drive and go nowhere. It requires a certain Zen approach to the road.

A standard driver’s license and clean driving record are all one needs to get a tow-trucking job. Companies teach their drivers how to operate the equipment and will likely send them to a 16-hour course offered by the California Tow Truck Assn.

Ongoing education can be found in national monthly trade magazines such as the American Towman and Tow Times. The latter features practical tips and safety advice, testimonials and photo spreads of the “How I got this car off the telephone guide wire” variety. It even has fiction, such as the adventures of a character named Gus in a short story collection called “Knights in Shining Tow Trucks.” Naturally, there are tow-truck Web sites.

Pay ranges from $7 to $12 an hour. Full-time drivers may make $35,000 annually or more--and operators such as Swan and Jennings receive full benefits.

While it is risky on any freeway in the region, riding in a 12,200-pound tow truck is safer than in almost any vehicle short of a tank, drivers say. Most other vehicles weigh 2,000 or 3,000 pounds.

The actual number of tow-truck drivers is guesswork. The tow-truck association, the only towing trade group in the state, counts 3,500 member companies in California. But some of those companies might have a cadre of employees.

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Marvin Swan has been driving tow trucks a dozen years. Other drivers admire him, most recently for getting a teetering Saab off a freeway guardrail Wednesday before last without using a flatbed truck or further damaging the squished import. This is the stuff tow-truck drivers cite as good work. This and not getting killed.

Swiftly, tow truckers pick up the lingo of cops, calling cars and people “vehicles” and “occupants,” using police radio codes as verbs. It is more efficient this way. Also, admits Swan, “it is kind of fun to have your own language.”

Sprouting like a plant out of Swan’s dashboard is an Auto Club computer over which he receives most service calls. It beeps and crackles at a few minutes before 4 p.m. Steven Shaft has locked his keys in his car outside a South Coast Village restaurant in Costa Mesa. Fortunately, Shaft had the caviar he’s distributing in an ice chest. He stands beside his red Honda in dress shirt and tie, looking sheepish. He already locked his keys in the car three hours earlier in Fullerton.

“I don’t know how many times I can do this in one day,” he declares before Swan opens his car in under five seconds with a slim-jim.

After this, 53 minutes drift by in which no calls come in for Swan--rare for the 4 o’clock hour. “This is a dead spot,” he says. “We’re usually more busy than this.”

The radio silence allows his personal story to unfold at a lazy pace as he tanks up on gas and air, then parks in the shade. Better to stay put than add wear to the Ford Super Duty truck, which cost about $47,000 after a conversion for towing.

How did he choose tow-truck driving as an occupation?

After graduation from Fountain Valley High School, Swan joined the Army. There, he ranked in the top 5% of his class and got to go to vehicle recovery school. And his tow-truck career was born.

Swan also found a wife in the Army; she drove a heavy truck.

When his discharge came and he joined the Army Reserve, Swan immediately found work as a tow-truck driver.

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After he drops off his boy at school, he drives his rig around the playground so the 4-year-old can show it off to classmates. And the hero worship doesn’t end there.

“When you’re getting someone off the freeway and they’re scared to death, you’re an angel to them,” Swan says.

At 4:53 p.m., Swan’s computer beeps with a dispatch: flat tire at South Coast Plaza. A flurry of requests land and six drivers on duty divvy up the calls.

At the outer edge of the mall parking lot, Lai Trinh of Irvine waits at the trunk of her Lexus with a friend.

“Big nail,” she tells Swan with a smile, pointing to her left rear tire. “It was a little low this morning,” she added, but there was no time to change the tire before her husband went to work. Swan nods understandingly. Trinh fled Vietnam 24 years ago. She has been an Auto Club member for more than 20 of those years. As a new immigrant, she said, it was clear she could not survive without a car or a way to call a tow truck.

The rest of the rush-hour shift is uneventful--a South Coast Plaza shopper who locked her keys in her car and a squabbling husband-wife team who make up after their Geo is towed to Fountain Valley.

Oh yes, and the perfect close to this ride-along. As Swan slides the truck into gear, Times photographer Al Schaben rushes toward the rig. Swan cocks his head to the right and smiles slowly. “He locked his keys in his car,” Swan predicts, and slowly lowers his window. The photographer announces, “You’re not going to believe this, this is the first time. . . .”

After Swan wields the slim-jim for two seconds, another relieved motorist drives off and Swan heads north back into the fray.