Breaker Bear: a big ten-four for the 14.4

Some stars live for the spotlight. Others shy away from it. And a few stumble in and out of its glare as if by accident. Gruff-voiced country singer George K. Lucas, a.k.a. Breaker Bear, falls firmly into the latter category.

Born in Nitro, West Virginia, in 1949, George’s greatest educational asset was a precociously bulky teenaged frame, perfect for flattening football opponents. He attended Georgia Tech on a sports scholarship, but left to pursue a law enforcement career after being permanently sidelined by a knee injury.

But Lucas soon discovered that the life of a police officer was not quite as exciting as it appeared on Dragnet or Adam-12. Stuck in a highway patrol car in the sweltering Georgia summer, waiting for unwary motorists to trip his speed trap, he distracted himself by eavesdropping on truckers’ Citizens Band radio conversations.

Before long, George began to dream of swapping his highway patrol hat for a trucker cap. He adopted the CB handle “Breaker Bear,” and became fluent in the coded vocabulary truckers use to warn their colleagues of the whereabouts of law enforcement officials.

Lucas's 1980 Elinem press photo.

By night George indulged his other hobby: writing country songs and performing them at local open-mike sessions. Thanks to his rumbling baritone and easygoing narrative style, Lucas’s story-songs clicked with the crowd, and he was soon singing to cash customers.

In September 1976 he performed at a high-school reunion in Lithia Springs, GA, whose attendees included an A&R representative from Elinem Nashville, then a leading country label. Shortly after, an Elinem demo deal officially launched George’s recording career.

And not a moment too soon. Back on the job, Lucas was in deep doo-doo with the department for his on-duty CB shenanigans. He had already been suspended without pay when he received word that ”The Ballad of Breaker Bear,” the B-side to his first single “No Lie,” was scaling the country charts. The tale of an underdog trucker triumphing over a corrupt cop became one of the iconic tracks of 1977. Meanwhile, Lucas took to calling himself Breaker Bear, partly to avoid confusion with the other George Lucas who was simultaneously attaining household-name status.

Lucas loved his moment in the sun. He appeared in a cameo on an early episode of CHiPs, recorded several public-service TV spots advocating the use of seatbelts, and was a guest of honor at the 1978 Mid-America Trucking Show.

But George’s ride on the fame pony was all too brief. His sophomore release, “Stick It to Them Boys,” flopped, as did his ensuing efforts, “Sun Don’t Shine” and “Good ‘Nuff for Uncle Sam, Good ‘Nuff for Me.” In 1980 Elinem Nashville dropped Breaker Bear.

After a catastrophic investment in Radiator Gourmet (a line of heat-and-eat meals for truckers) wiped out Lucas’s remaining savings, the 31-year-old singer found himself back on the job market in order to support his wife, Trudie, and their young daughters, Tiffanae and Krystall. Before long his résumé expanded to include celebrity judging of county-fair pie-eating contests and personal appearances at truck-stop Tupperware parties.

Country Clubbo star Breaker Bear in 1995.

But George never gave up on his music. In 1995 he recorded a new demo, funded by a small inheritance from Trudie’s fond great-aunt. Always a consumer electronics enthusiast, George had learned to connect to the nascent Internet via a repo-sale Macintosh Quadra 700 and a 14.4Kbps Global Village modem. His new song, “Log On,” hailed the joys of rambling the Information Superhighway in much the same way as “The Ballad of Breaker Bear” celebrated CB radio.

Lucas’s old industry contacts wanted nothing to do with “Log On.” But when Country Clubbo's Jared Clubb caught a whiff of the tune, he smelled money. Clubb, a fellow Internet enthusiast and early investor in such promising firms as E-FinanceSolutions.com and Robust Technologies, Inc., managed to negotiate a lucrative licensing deal with a leading Internet service provider. “Log On” became the theme song for one of their relentless ad campaigns, and Breaker Bear once more ruled the airwaves — for a few weeks.

These days, George and Trudie reside in a modest but comfortable house in Little Hope, TN. Tiffanae attends Nashville’s Draughons Junior College, and Krystall is a licensed realtor. George still crafts songs in his backyard studio/tool shed, and regularly pitches them up the road in Music City. He has especially high hopes for his latest number, “Peer to Peer.”