10-4 Magazine / May 2026 59 and started photographing in the early 70s with an Asahi Pentax Spotmatic SLR system while receiving a BA degree in Radio-TV-Film production from Temple University. After graduating in 1974, Duncan was fortunate to be hired as a sound tech by Clair Bros. Audio in Lancaster County, PA. Duncan spent two years on the road with bands like Loggins and Messina, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Elvis Presley, Chicago, Beach Boys and Peter Frampton, to name a few. Telling me a story about his time on the road with various bands, Duncan said, “As my job was onstage near the monitoring board being ready to correct any problem on the stage, I really didn’t have the opportunity to shoot the bands much. One time I got called out onstage in the middle of a Beach Boys song in sold-out Madison Square Garden to have a discussion with Al Jardine about the sound from his stage monitor. It would not have been good if I showed up with a camera around my neck. I did get a chance to shoot some of the Clair Bros. and other tour trucks, but back then a roll of film and slide processing was a little over ten bucks as I remember, so it wasn’t cheap to blast off tons of photos, compared to today’s digital cameras.” Moving to Los Angeles in 1978 to pursue a career in music, it was not a good time for musicians as disco had taken over and there were much fewer opportunities to perform in live bands onstage. “While I didn’t like LA or any of that scene, being on the West Coast did allow me to expand my trucking photography portfolio,” said Duncan. He moved back to the Philadelphia area and got involved with contributing to TRUCKS Magazine, edited by John Stevens. Articles and photos, along with coverage of truck shows at places like Englishtown and The Great American Truck Racing Series (GATR) at Pocono Motor Speedway, were featured. During that time, Duncan was hired by Revenge, a London based band doing original hard rock music. The band was managed by a major English rock manager who also managed the up-and-coming band known as Big Country. There’s a great story of Revenge being “sacrificed” for Big Country, and if you ever meet Duncan in person, you will have to ask him to tell you that story. In 1984, Duncan’s wife, Dr. Jeanette Dickerson-Putman, was doing research in Papua New Guinea for her PhD in Cultural Anthropology, and on her trip home, visited Hong Kong and purchased a Nikon FM-2 system, complete with a motor drive, for Duncan. A few years later, Jeanette accepted a research job in the Republic of Ireland and because of immigration laws, Duncan was unable to officially work there. But, being a bass player, he soon ended up with two top Irish bands, and ended up playing at The Guinness Jazz Festival in 1988, as well as recording some tracks for a hit Irish comedian’s album. Since Duncan had his days free, he had time to get really serious about his photography and hone his skills with the Nikon. “I started reading the photography magazines and wandered around and actually shot quite a few trucks cruising the Irish backroads. I had written a letter to an English magazine called Trucking International (TI) at that time, and they were immediately interested in me, since they had no one covering the trucking industry in Ireland at that time. My first article was going around the south of Ireland with a Volvo F-12 ‘lorry and drag’ (straight truck with trailer) with dismountable freight boxes, and that ended up being a cover story,” he said. Unfortunately, someone else was credited for the photo mistakenly, however it was corrected in the next issue. After that, Duncan went on to do a few more stories, with one trip that lasted about ten days and went from Ireland to England, and then a second ferry to France, where they ended up in Marseilles, where it was so bad they couldn’t leave sight of the truck at any time. Then they went way up to the Mt. Blanc tunnel into Italy where they ended up in a customs freight yard where they were stuck for a few days, but they had a great restaurant, and it being Italy, it wasn’t so bad. “We were actually locked in, and I sneaked a few shots of Soviet Bloc trucks that were there, mostly from Hungary, and a few Russian ones, as well. We had a tiny load of computer stuff, but the carnet (customs papers) were screwy, and it took two days to straighten out the problem. We finally made it back to the Republic with other hassles that shall wait for another time and place,” joked Duncan. “After Jeanette and I moved back to the USA in 1989, I started covering US trucking for TI,” said Duncan. Some of those included cover stories like the December 1990 issue, which featured Calvin Cochran’s beautiful black 1959 Mack B-61T equipped with a factory sleeper, a B-75 front-end, and powered by a 300-hp Maxidyne engine mated to a Mack Quadruplex (5x4) transmission. “Calvin’s truck was pretty unique at that time, as he was working it, pulling a 45-foot spread-axle Fruehauf covered wagon, hauling steel throughout the
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