Roy Gambrell, his wife, Linda, and their dog, Susie, make up almost a full percent of the population of New Deal, Tenn. For more than 60 years, the couple has called the quiet country town just south of the Kentucky state line home, and it serves as the backdrop for Roy’s rise to trucking royalty.
“Our home is 10 feet in front of where my wife was born,” he says. “We are not ones who like to move around much.”
Known to many as “The King of Corrosion” – “Rusty” to others and “Mr. Rust” to several more – Gambrell etched his legacy in trucking on the corroding undercarriages of trucks and trailers nationwide.
But more than 40 years before he would become king, Gambrell started out as a farmhand, as is the case in many rural Southern towns.
Growing up on a farm opened a window through which Gambrell eventually would climb through into trucking.
“I have always had a knack for equipment and how it functions,” he says, adding he learned to fix and fabricate out of necessity. “Most of the equipment or machinery we had was either so old that parts were not available or they were just plain worn out. We did not have ready funds to buy better, so we learned to make do with what we had, and we learned to either make parts or rebuild what we had with scrap that we were able to find.”
Gambrell’s father and uncle were both mechanics by trade, although he says today they would be called technicians. They passed their knowledge along to the youngster in between his parts runs.
