Carolyn Moon remembers traveling with her late husband, Bill, in the early 1960s, as he tried to interest truck stop owners in the future.

Bill Moon, in charge of Amoco’s truck stops across seven states, knew times were changing. Limited-access highways were being built, and Amoco, like other fuel companies, realized it would have to build fewer and bigger truck stops, providing more services at a single location than had been the norm on the two-lanes. Moon’s task was to talk mom-and-pop truck stops into moving closer to these newfangled interstates.

His arguments sometimes fell on deaf ears, particularly among the folks who just wanted to keep operating “the old, first-generation truck stop, where the husband ran the register and the wife changed the bedding,” Carolyn Moon says. One owner told Bill, “Well, if you don’t build out on the new road, people will have to come into town here, won’t they?”

“A lot of people were very slow on that,” Moon says. “The ones who made the move to the new roads were the true visionaries.”

Bill Moon believed so much in the modern interstate truck stop that he decided to run one himself. Today the Moons’ Iowa 80 in Walcott, home of the Walcott Truckers’ Jamboree, is one of the country’s premier truck stops, and Iowa 80 Chairman Carolyn Moon, like so many successful truck stop owners, is living the future that her husband envisioned.

According to the National Association of Travel Plazas & Truckstops, or NATSO, the typical truck stop employs 85 people, has annual sales of $7.8 million and pumps a million gallons of diesel a month. Sixty percent of NATSO members are chain facilities, up from 40 percent in 1994.