In Part 1 of TRAXERO On-The-Go Episode 3, I Stand With Flagman, we discuss how to raise more safety awareness for the towing industry with Founder & CEO of Flagman Inc., Cindy Iodice, who describes the events that led up to the inspiration for the Flagman initiative. Click play for more.

Transcription:

Shelli Hawkins:

Welcome everyone to podcast number three. We are super excited for all of our listeners to come and join us. Once again, my name is Shelly Hawkins. I am the co-host here at the TRAXERO On-The-Go Podcast, along with my other co-host, Miss Laura Dolan.

Laura, are you there?

Laura Dolan:

Yes, I’m here. Hello.

Shelli Hawkins:

Outstanding. You’ve had some [wild] weather last week in Ohio, I think. How, how’s everything going for you now?

Laura Dolan:

Sure did. We’re good now. Today’s just a boring, cloudy day, but yeah, yesterday we got some almost like hurricane like thunderstorms blow through in the evenings. Those were really, really fun.

Shelli Hawkins:

And you’ve pushed it over to me today in Maryland. So we’ve got that bright sun torrential downs pour. So it’s going back and forth for all that. So thank you very much. But as you know-

Laura Dolan:

You’re welcome.

Shelli Hawkins:

… April showers will hopefully bring May flowers, and this is my first year ever in my entire history of living in my adult life where I’ve not experienced a winter whatsoever.

Literally, there’s been maybe a couple flurries here in Maryland. Before it was Wisconsin and Iowa, so this is [unusual] for me. I’m like, what is happening? It’s 80 degrees here this week, so I’m loving it for sure.

Laura Dolan:

Yeah, same here. I mean, my husband and I moved to Ohio from the West Coast so we could experience four seasons and it snowed once in 2023 so far, so yay climate change. Not.

Shelli Hawkins:

Yes. I guess you could say that. And we are all ready for summertime for sure. Well, we are going to hop right into our guests. We want to get right to that because we want to give them as much time as possible because they’ve got, both have extensive backgrounds in the towing industry. I can’t wait to talk to them. We’ve got Tom Parbs joining us from HAAS Alert and then also Cindy Iodice from Flagman Safety. We want to talk to those folks as much as we can. I’m going to go ahead and bring them on.

Cindy and Tom, welcome to the TRAXERO On-The-Go Podcast. Thank you for joining us.

Cindy Iodice:

Happy to be here. Aloha!

Tom Parbs:

Yeah, thank you. Thanks for having me.

Shelli Hawkins:

Yeah, Cindy, where are you joining us from?

Cindy Iodice:

Well, I live in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Laura Dolan:

Nice.

Shelli Hawkins:

That’s fantastic. Yes. And Tom, where are you talking to us from today?

Tom Parbs:

So the HAAS Alert headquarters is in downtown Chicago, and so I live just northwest of the city in the suburbs, so calling from my home office.

Shelli Hawkins:

That is fantastic. I love it. So we’ve got Maryland, Ohio, Chicago, Illinois, and then Honolulu, Hawaii. That is quite the spread of folks here, different locations. Thank you guys for joining us.

Laura Dolan:

You got to love magic of Zoom that makes that happen.

Shelli Hawkins:

Absolutely. So Cindy, I will tell you that the very first time that I heard about you was listening to the Tow Business Podcast and you came on the podcast with Brad and Jeff, and I was overwhelmed with the message and the story, and I’m really excited to get into a little bit of that. So I’ll just kick it over to you. And I guess just to start things off, tell us about where you grew up and how you grew up in the towing industry.

Cindy Iodice:

Yeah, well thank you again for having me and it’s an honor to be on here with Tom Parbs from HAAS Alert, honestly. So I grew up in Fairfield, Connecticut, and I’m in the middle of seven children. My family had big visions of a towing empire with all the kids working in the business. So in the early 1950s, my grandfather Mickey started a gas station. He started a service station and my dad, every day when he was walking to school as a young boy, he would pass a gas station on the corner of their street that had tow trucks. And my dad talked about falling in love with the idea of learning how to drive a tow truck.

So in 1958, when he was 19, he talked his dad into getting their first tow truck, a Holmes 750, and there wasn’t anybody to teach my dad how to use the truck. So my dad taught himself what he could do with it and to drum up business he went around and told other people what he could do with this tow truck. And we have family archives stating back to those days of Mickey’s Tow Truck in action on the front page of the paper.

Shelli Hawkins:

Wow.

Cindy Iodice:

Yeah, just incredible. We have 70 years of family archives, which was shocking and beautiful. I didn’t want to drive a tow truck. Yeah. As a kid in the seventies and eighties, my mom would put us all on the station wagon and take us up onto Interstate 95 when a tractor trailer went down embankment and split open in the belly. I remember picking up single cola cans. We were told if it was damaged, throw it out. If it’s good, take it home. And so we had this massive stack of single cola cans in our garage for months.

So I worked on the side of Interstate 95, which runs from the New York line to the Massachusetts line, a very busy thoroughfare and the stretch of highway between where we lived and where the business was notorious for, and still is, for major tractor trailer collisions. So my dad became the guy in Connecticut, and I think at one point he worked from the New York line to New Haven line, and then he also worked up in the valley inland until other heavy duty tow companies came along.

So in 1980, my father and six other guys in Connecticut started the Towing and Recovery Professionals of Connecticut. They helped establish the rules of the road. You could no longer just pull up in a tow truck and take a car. You had to be on the list. And they established rules on how they were going to work together. And so there’s a rotation list both locally and with the state police.

So in the 80s, Mickey’s was in its heyday. I think at one point my dad had 16 trucks. He was the first in the state of Connecticut to get an airbag van and then demo with the first responders on what they could do with the airbag van. And we did go to tow shows in Chicopee, Framingham, Mass. We went to the New Hampshire Show, the Baltimore Show, the Lake George Show. My dad had a tow show in Connecticut back in the late 80s to demonstrate equipment.

So my two oldest brothers were driving from before they got their licenses and were we’re definitely born to be towers. My sisters all work the office, we all answered phones, we all dispatched drivers, we all cleaned up wrecks. Right? It was what we did as a family. And then for these tow shows, we would convoy with the trucks, a long line of trucks. It was a thing back then. I don’t even know if they still do that today, but convoy in the driver, his wife, his girlfriend, and then all of us kids would be put in the airbag van that had no windows. It was a big box with all the equipment in it. And we would go to these tow shows. So we’d leave on Thursday and come home on Sunday. We always get to miss school for shows. So I grew up going to tow shows. And so there’s a lot of people in the industry. I’m not going to mention any names that were wild at these tow shows. It was a chance for tow operators and their families to let loose. And my favorite part of all the tow shows was the Saturday night dinner and dance. And as a little kid, we were out on the dance floor whooping it up.

Shelli Hawkins:

Well, and that’s one thing that I love about the tow shows, and Tom can attest to this, is it is an opportunity for our industry to disconnect from the dispatcher. That’s what I call it, disconnecting from the dispatcher. And it’s just like a family reunion for all of us. We see all the folks that we have either helped out as a vendor in the industry or come to know and love, and we genuinely call them our family because we’ve helped them out in some way or they’ve helped us. Tom and I have loved it. I don’t know. Tom, how many years have you been coming to the tow shows now?

Tom Parbs:

Three. This is my third year coming to the tow shows. Gosh, Orlando 2021 right after we could go back from COVID, was my very first genuine tow show. And then I think in 2021 I did 30 conferences from April to November. Last year I think I did like 50 or 60, and I’ve already done seven or eight since the beginning of this year. I’ve been all over the place.

Shelli Hawkins:

Wow. That’s fantastic. And Cindy, I love that memory for you. Keep going with what you were saying.

Cindy Iodice:

Yeah, really, really great memory. Plus I got to get out of school ever since first grade I got to get out to take this long weekend with my family and just really enjoyed traveling to the tow shows in this convoy and also watching other convoys of trucks come in. It was the highlight just to be with the industry and my parents were in the middle. They were just in the middle, had great friends and it was always a great event for us. And we went to the same ones every year all the time. It just was so great. I love Hampton Beach, New Hampshire. That show was just so… Lake George. We had little more freedom in Lake George. They had game rooms for kids. It just was great. It’s a great memory.

So I knew a lot of people in the towing industry, a lot of the legends and the long timers now from when I was little. So my dad from 1958, getting that truck and teaching himself what to do with it, helping establish the Connecticut towing industry. My dad’s, his reputation is just a guy who dedicated his life to towing. He was all in. So the phone was always ringing on our house, always rang at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve always rang when we sat down. My dad just finished carving the Turkey and it was time to eat on Thanksgiving and the phone would ring. And so our life was constantly disrupted by my dad and my brothers needing to go out and do these tows, these big wrecks. Snow, sleet, rain, dark, it didn’t matter. And we have two decades of footage from VHS from back in the 80s. It’s big wrecks. So we are working on a film called Tow It All. It’s about my dad’s rise in the towing industry to the Hall of Fame.

And it’s been put on hold for Flagman. So in 1995, my father was inducted into the International Towing and Recovery Hall of Fame. And boy that that’s the pinnacle of the industry. The guys in the Hall of Fame are considered industry legends. And my dad was so proud of his blue coat that they gave him. He wore that thing all the time. And then my brothers, as my brothers got older, they were running things more. And my brother, Corey, my oldest brother, he started really practicing safety techniques in the 80s. My mom was always worried about the tow-ops and my brothers, my dad, because the transportation that she started, industry started to change. It wasn’t what it was in the 70s and 80s when I was on the side of the road. There were more cars on the road and more distractions were starting to infiltrate the transportation industry.

And so the guys that worked for my family all had stories about near misses, about the side mirror being hit. My dad had a saying to everybody, if you hear screeching tires, don’t even look just bolt. If that means diving over an embankment, then do it. Don’t look to see where the screech is coming from. Get out of the way. And so they have a lot of instances over the years and stories of near misses and having to dive off I-95 to avoid being hit.

So Corey started, my oldest brother, Corey started wearing high visibility safety vests. He created a manual and he eagerly shared that with others. My little brother, Chris, who’s the youngest in the family of seven, youngest boy, he took his driver’s license in a tow truck. And when he showed up to DMV, the guy was a little bit reluctant because nobody had ever showed up with the tow truck. And that’s how Chris got his license. And when he graduated high school, he got a flatbed for graduation. So definitely in the family.

Shelli Hawkins:

I want to know, what did you do after high school and college? You-

Cindy Iodice:

Oh, I got a one-way ticket to Hawaii.

Shelli Hawkins:

Did you stay stay in Connecticut? Did you stay in Connecticut with the family?

Cindy Iodice:

As soon as I could have a job, I started saving my money because when I was nine, Mickey, my grandfather, my grandmother vacationed in Hawaii and they came back and told us these great stories and they gave me this little license plate with my name on it. It said Cindy, the Aloha State, and I still have it. And I did a book report that year when I was nine about how people in Hawaii lived in grass huts, straight out of the encyclopedia, totally plagiarized that story. And then went to my parents and said, “I want to move to Hawaii.” They’re like, “You’re nine.” So they wouldn’t let me pursue that dream until I turned 18. So from nine to 18, any money that I got from my paper route and my babysitting jobs, I stashed away. And when I graduated high school, I had my plane ticket to Hawaii. So I got a one-way ticket to Hawaii when I was 18 years old.

Laura Dolan:

That’s everybody’s dream and you actually did it. That’s amazing.

Tom Parbs:

And maybe we need to make sure the listeners understand because we’re probably dating ourselves. She used an encyclopedia. If I said encyclopedia to my children today, or even my oldest children that are in their early twenties, they’d look at me like I’m [weird]. So that was the internet back in the days. It was a book and you would buy them from people that came door to door. And that was our reading material. That’s how we looked up information when we were growing up.

Shelli Hawkins:

Absolutely.

Cindy Iodice:

And the yellow pages.

Tom Parbs:

Yeah.

Shelli Hawkins:

Cindy, I love that you knew what you wanted to do at such an early age and you were just so driven to do it, and that’s just fantastic. It reminds me of a couple people in my family that have been that saving their money to do the things. So the future’s super bright for them. So you wanted to make movies or be in cinema?

Cindy Iodice:

Well, yeah. So interestingly enough, also when I was nine, I took my first picture. My brother Corey and Brian, my two oldest brothers took me on a fishing trip. And when we were sitting at this pond, Mill River Pond in Fairfield, Connecticut. I saw it was fall. And I saw this, the trees were reflected, mirrored in the water, and I thought it was the most beautiful thing I ever saw. So the next day after school, without telling anybody, I grabbed the family camera, got on my bike and rode there. It was maybe a half mile from our house, and I took my first photo and I still have it today.

Laura Dolan:

Oh, wow.

Cindy Iodice:

I wanted to be a storyteller and a photographer is what I wanted to do. But most importantly, I wanted to go to college.

Shelli Hawkins:

When my brother was in seventh grade, he looked at my dad and said, I think I want to be a photographer. And I come from a very long lineage. My family are from the trades. And so my dad was an electrician historically, and so most of the people in my family working were just, I guess for lack of blue collar workers or tradesmans or whatever, mechanics, etc. And so when my brother said I wanted to be a photographer, my dad was from, with his very strong southern accent, “Do what? What are you talking about?” And to this day, at the age of, I think he’s around 45, he is still a photographer. And I love that. It’s just to know from an early age what your passion is fantastic. I love it.

Cindy Iodice:

So I was going to school for photography, and the professor asked us to light and shoot a vase, like a flower vase. And so I went into the studio by myself on the weekend and set up the lights and set up the vase, and I found it to be very boring. And I stood back, I went all the way to the back wall of the room, and I ended up shooting the lighting, the scene, and the set. And I was like, this is what I want to do. I want to be on a movie set. And so my Bachelor of Fine Art project was I went down to the docks in Honolulu and filmed, I taught myself how to do time-lapse, and I would go down under the cover of darkness and I would film the ships being loaded and unloaded at the docks. And I turned that time-lapse video into an hour-long movie. And I was like, okay, I know this has already been invented, but this is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen, that I could take thousands of photos and turn it into a movie. And that’s when I knew that I needed to go to film school.

Shelli Hawkins:

Fantastic. And you have been in Hawaii in the cinema industry for how many years now?

Cindy Iodice:

A long time. Yeah, a long time. Well, I got here in ’84, been close with my family, go back and forth all the time. But about 10 years ago I started, I had Iodice Media, which is a production company. And my passion has always been about telling my stories, my family’s stories, filming my dad and talking about his career. So Iodice Media is really about telling stories about family, community, heart, love, the things that I find most important.

Shelli Hawkins:

All of it. Talk about some of the events that transpired to bring about what we call Flagman Safety today. How did that come about?

Cindy Iodice:

Yeah, so right after the pandemic started, my youngest brother, Chris, got two calls. One was a post office truck and one was a private tow. And Cory lived in Florida. He actually lived in Orlando, but because of the pandemic, early 2020, the rental car company had canceled his ride home. And so he got stuck in Connecticut instead of being able to go home. And so he was just sitting in his trailer. He’d been building a model tank. He waited for a part for a long time. The part finally came in. And so he was just drinking a soda working on this model tank. And Chris came in and said, “Hey, we’ve got two tows. Which one do you want?” So Corey picked the disabled vehicle on the Merritt Parkway, which is Route 15 in Connecticut. So it’s a scenic highway. Two lanes in each direction runs from the New York line to the Massachusetts line.

And so Chris went off to do the post office truck, and Corey went up onto the Merritt Parkway. So they had called the Connecticut State Police, and they said, “Well, we don’t have anybody available to go up there, but good, thanks for letting us know that Corey’s going to be up there.” And then Chris went out to do the other tow. But because of the pandemic, the driver of the disabled vehicle was not allowed to ride in the cab of the truck with Corey, which used to be natural, normal protocol. A lot of times, I want to go out with my dad or one of my brothers, and I wasn’t allowed to because they had to bring the passengers of the vehicle back and there wouldn’t be room for me. And so my family let him know that he needed a ride. And so when Corey got up there, it was a little bit unusual and that he had to wait for that driver’s brother to show up to get to give him a lift off of the Merritt Parkway.

And so he was there for a few more minutes than normally he would’ve been. They had a whole hook and book. Just get up there, get it, get off, get out of there. It’s always dangerous. So when the guy’s brother came up, the flatbed was here, and then the guy that was broke down had an old model Mercedes, and then his brother showed up in Lexus and they were off the shoulder on the other side of the white line and actually on the grass. And when the guy came, the two brothers are standing out on the parkway, just on the side watching, and Corey said, you know what? It’s not safe out here. You need to get in the car. And so he walked them to the Lexus, went back to the truck and started operating the flatbed, bringing the Mercedes up onto the bed.

And Dean Robert, who had been on another route 25, was reported later that he had passed traffic over the white line on the shoulder on the exit ramp to get onto Route 15, because he was driving erratically. And somebody said he looked like a race car driver locked in, and he was impatient in traffic. And mind you, it’s the pandemic. Even golf courses were closed in Connecticut, although he was golfing on that day and he was driving erratically under the influence and weaving in and out of traffic. And so when he came on the straightaway where these guys were, my brother and the other guys, he decided that this lane was too slow. This lane was too slow. And he popped out and tried to go on the shoulder. So he passed the traffic over the white line, but the minute he popped out from behind the car in the right lane, he must have seen the Lexus, the Mercedes in the flatbed, and the car went out of control immediately.

The black box said he was going 90 miles per hour, five seconds before impact. So he hit the… The Lexus, which hit the Mercedes and then the BMW that this guy was driving, literally rode the rail. Rode the rail. And the medical examiner said there was nothing Corey could have done to save his own life that day. Just so, oh my gosh. So painful, so tragic, so unbelievable. It was shocking for the towing industry, not just in Connecticut, but we’ve been in the industry for decades and nobody could believe that it was Corey. How could Corey die up there? It just really speaks to the problem of reckless distracted driving under the influence and with no care for the amber lights or anything that’s happening on the side of the road. So Corey died there, right then and there because the impact actually separated his legs from his body. [inaudible 00:23:10] he could have done. There was nothing he could have done.

So yeah, the worst thing that could have happened to a long time, to a family with my dad who’s in the Hall of Fame. I mean, it just devastated him. And I remember my brother called me, my brother Chris, you and I always feel bad for Chris because he was hearing the scanner. He was back at the shop, and what he heard was that state police was sending everybody up there, and he knew that that was about where Corey was. And nobody would tell my brother, Chris what was going on. And of course, reach Corey. His calls were going unanswered. And there was a real panic. But Chris was alone in that panic. And my dad lived directly across the street from the shop and was home, and Chris was trying to figure out what was going on. And even the guys, my cousins got Mickey’s, a Bridgeport and Charlie, all these guys that knew Bud’s Towing went up there. They knew what had happened. Nobody would tell Chris.

But the minute the state police car pulled in the driveway, he knew. He had to cross the street and tell my dad. But before he did that, he called his wife and then he called me. I got off the phone with Chris and I FaceTimed my sister-in-law. She just [inaudible 00:24:29] in the business, was my sister-in-law, my brothers and my two brothers. That was it. They were the heart of the business at this point. My dad was retired. My dad was already 82 and called my sister-in-law. And she hadn’t told the kids and just started crying. And the girls were like, what is wrong? What is going on? And I mean, it’s hard to even speak like, Uncle Corey was killed. And then of course, I called my dad and he just could not.

Corey’s death was the beginning of the end for my dad. It broke his heart. He was devastated. He had guilt about building this industry and raising his family and then losing his firstborn son in this very tragic way. No matter how safe they were. So I got on a plane, it was COVID, it was horrible. People had space suits on and masks and rubber gloves, and you had to wipe everything down before you touched anything. And nobody knew how to travel. It was April 22, 2020. Nobody knew what COVID was and who could get it. And yet I had to fly 6,000 miles. I had to get on a plane and sit there for 10 hours and trying to get to my family.

And just like the funeral was 10 people. And then we couldn’t be in the church because the priest wouldn’t let us and we had to be at the cemetery. And we couldn’t have the typical tow truck parade because the town felt like people were not allowed to be buried because COVID was then. It was then, they didn’t know. And so they were like, people weren’t allowed to have funerals and bodies were being held from being buried. And they said, if the Iodice family has a tow truck parade in honor of Corey, A, we could be the spreaders of COVID. And B, we could be the target of ridicule in the community that why do they get the special treatment? But my family worked side by side with all those first responders for decades. And when I was little, we had a party in our backyard every summer. And that party was for state police, Fairfield Police, Fairfield Fire, EMS. Those were all our friends. [inaudible 00:26:41]

Shelli Hawkins:

That’s fantastic. Yeah.

Cindy Iodice:

[inaudible 00:26:43] first responders were our friends.

Shelli Hawkins:

It’s a brotherhood of folks for sure.

Cindy Iodice:

Yeah. Anyway, so we went through all that and I was there for six weeks and I took a picture. I’m a photographer. I’m a visual person. But set up a shot that was happening in the funeral home, and it was my dad in his scooter in front of the casket with his firstborn son. And then I was standing at the casket with my brother and his wife and his girls, and he just asked somebody to take this photo, we need this photo because it really speaks to the problem and that we were burying tow operators, firefighters, EMTs, DOTs. So I stayed for six weeks and the whole thing was just horrible.

And then I came home and as soon as I got back to Hawaii, I’m a media maker and I have a huge pot of resource of creative people. I have my own media company and I hire people all the time. So we started meeting on Zoom, I want to say there was about 10 or 12 of us, and I said, something’s wrong and I don’t know how to fix it. And I want you guys to help me figure out what can we do? Is slow down, move over the right word? Do we need something different? People respond to click it or ticket, right? Yeah. Slow down, move over it? We didn’t know if we needed a new tagline or a new character.

Shelli Hawkins:

So what I love about all this is something amazing and beautiful came out of this incredibly unspeakable tragedy. And you went back home after going through this entire situation with your family, your brother, seeing the industry again that you had not been a part of, and all the COVID struggles that you had, and you came back with the exact same drive that you had at the age of nine and said, there is a problem. What we’re doing today is somewhat working, but obviously not. And it needs improvement. It needs incredible amount improvement, and how can we do it? What can we do about it? And you came back and said, let’s make a change. And you started all this. And so that is just incredible because you could have gone back and remained angry and become bitter and just sat there inside yourself with all the things and not worked through the feelings and the healing that everyone does when they are grieving the loss of someone that they desperately love, that’s a part of their family. Thank you so much for doing that, by the way. I’m excited to unpack everything about Flagman Safety. So continue on with the Zoom that you started meeting with people.

Cindy Iodice:

Yeah. Well, here was my reality. My oldest brother was struck and killed. My dad was devastated. It was a very confusing time for all of us. But can I just talk about the pain of this kind of loss and the bigger picture for what it meant for my family, what it meant for our community, how it affected the first responders, who by the way, would come to the door. It was COVID, right? And the doorbell was ringing and the police were there and the fire were there and they were delivering lunch. We did get surrounded by the community as best as they could under the COVID umbrella of six foot distance or whatever it was at that time. So we went through all of that, and when I came home, I just like… The grief. I don’t know if it’s ever going to get better, but at that time, at that time, so it was like June 2020, I found myself either in a fetal position, in bed, grieving this horrible thing that had happened to my family or sitting up right at my computer trying to figure out what can we do, what can I do?

And I do have regrets about, I don’t regret living in Hawaii. I don’t regret following my heart. But my family had been such a force in the towing industry in the 80s and 90s. And when I finally started looking at the archives and looking at the videotapes of all the crashes and all the stuff they did, I really missed out. I missed out on this bond, the bond that the rest of them had because I’m the only one that doesn’t live in Connecticut other than Corey getting his place in Florida. But I was the only one that left and just didn’t want to be a part of. And I actually kind of resented the industry when I was little because my dad was never around and I didn’t want to drive a tow truck and all that stuff.

So I was either grieving in bed or sitting up and shockingly, within a couple of months of my returning home, our team came up with that idea of animating the flagman, the universally recognized safety symbol with safety colors that everybody on the planet has been exposed to Flagman. And we thought, what if we made Flagman the spokesperson for slow down, move over? What if Flagman was on a sign? And the sign rattled a little bit and he peeled away and jumped into action to become every driver’s best friend. The guy who’s going to teach you about slow down, move over and a little bit annoyed. Flagman’s a little bit annoyed like that he’s got to get off the sign at all and tell people you need to slow down and move over. Like, look, what’s going on here.

So we had our prototype in July of 2020. I contacted the animation team and said, this is what we’re thinking. And they sent me back this eight second clip of Flagman jumping off the sign and then appearing in front of a flatbed and just doing a little dance in the road. And I was like, whoa. So I sent it to my dad, my nieces, my brother, my family. And so what do you guys think? And the girls who were maybe 10 and 15 at the time, 10, 13 and 15, they said, we love how Flagman comes off the sign.

Shelli Hawkins:

Yes, fantastic. And I love, at that point in time, did you, you know how you were going to spread the word about this? Had you had a plan about that?

Cindy Iodice:

Well, my plan was this… Thank you. That’s a great question, by the way. My plan was to get myself down to the Tennessee Tow Show that fall with a 30-second video of Flagman. And this is where Kenny Tom comes in. I contacted Kenny and said, Hey, we want to shoot this video, this 30-second PSA with Flagman and have the animation team put Flagman in. And he was like, whatever you need. And so we met here on Oahu, the road that had two lanes in each direction with a center, a center green area, and then it had a stoplight. And we picked it because in the backdrop was the H-1 freeway and so there was traffic and you could see FedEx trucks and whatever passing this over this viaduct. And I picked it because we would be relatively safe on the side of the road, even though I don’t think that really exists.

And what I didn’t realize about shooting this PSA with Kenny is that I was recreating the scene in which my brother died. And I didn’t know, I was just so focused on getting something done so that I could show the towing industry and all responders and highway workers that we were going to build something that could help educate the public on this problem. So when we flew a drone over our roadside scene and the drone gave us so much information about how traffic was driving toward the amber lights on the truck instead of away. It was really shocking and it was really nerve-wracking. I was really like, I didn’t want anybody to get hurt. I didn’t want to get hurt. I didn’t want anybody to get killed. I just wanted to create something. So we did that, and then we had it done in time to get down at the Tennessee Tow Show, and my goal was to go down and talk to Will and Jeff at Miller Industries and pitch the board at the International Towing and Recovery Hall of Fame.

And fortunately, we had already started working on Tow It All in 2016. And so my dad, we had filmed my dad down in Tennessee, and so my dad introduced me to all those guys down there. I already knew Gratzianna, I already knew Jeffrey Godwin, and of course Tom Tedford, who’s from Connecticut. And I knew Jeff and I knew Will, and we had interviewed those guys for my dad’s film. And so my dad couldn’t travel to Tennessee with us.

So my dad ended up getting COVID, and his heart was so broken that I did believe he was going to make it and come home from the hospital. And I remember him saying to me, “I’m never coming home, right?” I’m like, no, dad, dad, no, you’re totally coming home. But what I didn’t understand was that he was going to test positive for COVID the next day, and that was going to be the beginning of the end.

So anyway, we went down to Tennessee to pitch Flagman, and to go to Corey’s memorial and that kind of thing down there and went with my film crew. And Flagman is really interesting because I don’t know who else can relate to this, but everything that’s happening, it’s like I’m just the conduit. Something will come to mind and I’ll have a vision and I’ll bring it to my team. I’m like, oh, I think we should do this. And then all of a sudden all these things have been falling into place and it’s been like that the whole time.

Shelli Hawkins:

It’s like the idea has always been there, but no one extracted it and put it into motion. And you are the leader to make that happen. I find that so much with not just technology, but ideas in general.

Cindy Iodice:

Yeah. This, let me tell you, it’s been a real emotional journey for me personally because I’m living with the grief every day. Every time I’m engaging with Flagman, I’m reminded of why Flagman exists. So Flagman was born because Corey died, right? We can’t save Corey, right? It’s too late for Corey. And I don’t know, I just feel so passionate about… Towing’s in my blood. And I know the first responder industry because of my family. My brothers and my dad were recognized for saving lives. My dad’s whole career was built around keeping the traveling public safe. And I realized that my leaving Connecticut and coming to Hawaii and becoming a filmmaker, a media maker, a director, an editor, a photographer, a videographer. Everything in my life has made me uniquely positioned to be the leader of Flagman. Like all the education, just everything. And some days it makes me cry. I just weep because it’s bigger than me. This isn’t about me. It’s not even really about Corey. It’s too late for Corey. It’s about coming up with something to help, to help in this area.

So the education piece, I knew we wanted to educate the public. We made a PSA. And a year ago I was like, we’re going to go into the schools and we’re going to educate K through 12. And then Senator Blumenthal, who has been a huge advocate of Flagman and went down to DC and talked to Secretary Buttigieg and said, “Corey Iodice was killed in Connecticut. We need to do something.” Which I thought was incredible. His office said, “Look, we have a grant we want you to apply for.” And so I was like, okay. They’re like, “The deadline passed, so hurry up.” I was like, what?

And so it was under the Innovation and Education grant is what it was called. And I was like, wait, what are we teaching the kids? And it forced us to get to together with my team and figure out how do we bring this into the schools and what does that look like? And so now one year later, we’re launching the education outreach program in 10 days.

Shelli Hawkins:

Wow. In Connecticut, correct? So the flagship of Flagman Safety is going to be in your home state of Connecticut. That is incredible. It’s no surprise to me. I am a firm believer that every single thing in life happens for a reason and don’t live. I have the life philosophy of don’t live with regrets. Just understand that I went through that season of life to be the person I am today. I am so incredibly sorry that your family had to go through this tragedy, but I’m also passionately engaged with Flagman Safety, and I love how this is bringing awareness to our towing industry. Thank you for being the leader. And just like you said, the conduit for this message, it’s bigger than all of us, but we need a leader and we need an organizer. And so that’s where you come in. Cindy, thank you so much for that.

Cindy Iodice:

Yeah, well, thank you. Look, we’re building something that’s going to outlive all of us. We initially thought Smokey the Bear or the Geico Gecko.

Shelli Hawkins:

Yes.

Cindy Iodice:

And one day Flagman is going to be in a commercial with the Geico Gecko, and that gecko is going to get flattened on the road and he’s going to pop up with his little insurance spiel-

Shelli Hawkins:

Oh my word. I want to see that.

Cindy Iodice:

… and be like, “Slow down. Everybody slow down and move over.”

Shelli Hawkins:

I want to see that. I grew up with Smokey the Bear.

Laura Dolan:

That would be super powerful. Wow.

Shelli Hawkins:

I grew up with Smokey the Bear. Some people can relate to the DARE Program or MADD, and I think you’ve had a great big working with the group from MADD, Cindy. And these are things that stick with you in your brain because you learn them at such an early age. And we say it a lot that the towing industry does a fantastic job of internal education. We all know to slow down and move over, but we often talk about educating the public. We just haven’t seen anything come out about really doing it really well until you came along and certainly until HAAS Alert came along. How can people find you? What is your website? What are your socials? How can we find you? How can we get ahold of you and how can we support you? How can our listeners support you? Answer all those questions.

Cindy Iodice:

Yeah. Well, HAAS Alert is a, has endorsed Flagman right from the very beginning, and we’re so grateful for that. In addition to Mothers Against Drunk Driving, AAA, DOT. We’ve got a little bit of funding from ConnDOT and [inaudible 00:41:17], which is allowing us to launch our pilot program of 10,000 students in Fairfield, Connecticut. So I’m very excited about that because Flagman needs to show what it’s built to do so that we can grow. So I Stand With Flagman is our battle call. He’s family Flagman, and we’re at flagmansafety.com. We can be found on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. We’re all over the place.

So before you move on, I just want to say that what we’re going to do is we have four grade bands, or we have K through two, three through five, six through eight in high school. And Flagman is not a one and done. We’re not going to Fairfield. And that’s it. We’re moving on. It’s going to be something that somebody, whoever’s in kindergarten this year, every year for the next 12 years, they’re going to be exposed to a higher degree of Flagman in an age appropriate content. So we’re going to introduce the kids in K through two, to who works on the side of the road by bringing the first responders in to the school and developing those relationships. Three through five. We’re going to encourage kids to have empathy and sympathy and compassion, and the kids in elementary school are going to be bugging their parents to drive right and do right. And then from sixth grade high school, we’re going to teach kids about being active passengers and that lead into being responsible drivers. So I’m really excited about the program that we’ve developed in a very short amount of time. And I feel like we’re going to do an amazing job.

Shelli Hawkins:

You are going to do amazing job. You have done an amazing job. And it’s flagmansafety.com on all the socials. Are you folks on Instagram, by the way?

Cindy Iodice:

Yes.

Shelli Hawkins:

Fantastic. We will connect with you immediately, and you folks can go out there and I’m sure there’s a Contact Us section if you want to reach out to Cindy directly, she will answer all those things. Thank you so much for sharing us your story and all things safety.

Laura Dolan:

Thank you for listening to part one of this episode of TRAXERO On-The-Go. I Stand With Flagman. Be on the lookout for part two coming soon. You can find it at traxero.com/podcast or any other mainstream podcast network.

Music by AlexGrohl from Pixabay