A trucking story, --- by Harry Rudolfs
"We had to be handy with tools in those days. The roads were narrow, and if they were pavement, then the asphalt was always breaking up...We look back now and say how rough it was, but it wasn't rough back then. At least it didn't seem like it at the time."
Harry Smith, founder of Smith Transport, what became the largest trucking company in the British Commonwealth, when it was purchased by Canadian Pacific in 1958.
I met Tom Stewart for lunch at Nick's Truck Stop on Highway 2, just east of Woodstock, Ont. He's a tall man with a slightly stooped gait, the detritus of a back problem that ended his trucking career. But in 1950, he was a 16 year old kid driving dump trucks around town. A few years later he'd graduated to hauling new cars out west, mostly to Alberta and Saskatchewan.
"Most drivers today wouldn't know what it feels like to drive into a headwind across the prairies at 35 mph," says Stewart, over bites of a fried western sandwich. "Most drivers wouldn't know what a headwind is."
By coincidence, Stewart's friend Howard Burton drops in for a coffee. He's 78 but doesn't look 70, with peppered hair and sideburns. And he's still driving truck, working the occasional Saturday for Rutherford Farms.
But in 1958, Burton was an owner operator with brand new White 3400 tractor that he had on with Arrow Transfer Lines, and he'd just hired Stewart as a co-driver to run Toronto/Winnipeg with him.
Big things were happening 50 years ago. Transport companies, hungry for operating authorities, were buying up smaller ones. Smith had just acquired Hayward Transport of Milton, Ont., and Motorways, newly-purchased by British interests, was in the expansion mode, also running teams between Winnipeg and Toronto.
Kingsway Transport bought up Arrow in 1958, and one day Stewart and Burton were called in to the safety manager's office at the Kingsway terminal in west Toronto.
"Buttons' Page is what we called him," says Burton. "Because of the brass buttons on the front of his jacket."
It was a requirement that all drivers working for Kingsway had to pass a written test. Burton went to take the test while Stewart fidgeted.
"In those days you had to be 30 years old to drive for Kingsway. And I figured he was going to fire me because I was just 22," adds Stewart.
Finally Page looked up from his desk. "All right young man, you can take the examination, but we'll be keeping a close eye on you."
Incidentally, many of the scenes in the first trucking television series, Cannonball, were shot in that yard at Queensway and North Queen. It's now a shopping mall with a Home Depot and Walmart, but it was once a trucking hub for Kingsway, with a huge control tower that resembled the wheelhouse of a ship.
Stewart and Burton remember watching a crew shooting the action drama/series in the yard. The plots involved drivers "Cannonball" Mike Malone and Jerry Austin who solved crimes and stopped runaway trucks.
It was eventually shown all over the world and depicted truck drivers as the guardians of the highways. I clearly remember the black and white show from my childhood-it's probably the reason I still drive truck.
Looking at Stewart and Burton, I can almost imagine them as young drivers in crisp, pressed uniforms, with peaked hats and shined shoes.
"Say, you highliners were kind of the elites, weren't you?"
Stewart cracks a smile. "Well, we didn't wear running shoes," he says.
An antique truck enthusiast, Stewart has rebuilt a barn full of trucks, but he treasures his 1963 Hayes cabover most of all. It's got a 318 Detroit and a 4X4 Spicer tranny-and over 2 million working miles. Stewart's rebuilt it twice and still hauls it out for the occasional truck show. He's got it painted up in Arnold Bros. colours, where he was a broker for more than two decades, delivering farm machinery and heavy equipment across the US and Canada.
"It was a good truck, a big truck, made in Canada and I drove it for a long time. It was one of first trucks to Newfoundland," he says with a chuckle.
Later Stewart phones Charlie Gilbert, now in his 80s, another veteran Winnipeg driver who used to work for Safety Freight. They met at a the bunk house in Jellico, nothing more than a service centre and a few houses between Geraldton and Beardmore where truck drivers would layover, before the first Huskys arrived on the scene.
Stewart passes the phone and Gilbert tells me a story about "Highway Hank" Stroud, a colourful "wheeler-dealer" who drove Thunder Bay to Toronto for Hayward Transport.
"Once I saw him leaning against his truck in Dryden, Ont. in front of an Imperial station," says Gilbert . "I yelled at him, 'That truck don't need any help, Hank, it can stand by it self.' Always the joker, Hank shot back, 'My tires are so thin, I've got to keep the mosquitoes off them or they'll bite right through."
Unfortunately, the ranks of these veterans are growing thin. Stewart buried two of his trucking friends in the same week this spring, Skip Stevenson and Bill McDermitt both of whom worked with him at McAuley's Transport.
But Stewart continues to keep the memories alive. In 2003, with a little help from his friends, he put together an "East-West Truckers Reunion" on his farm and 200 people showed up.
We owe a lot to drivers like Tom Stewart. They experienced Canada first-hand, with all its extremes of weather and geography. They changed their own tires, waded axle-deep in gumbo in the springtime, fought their way through whiteouts, ice storms and blizzards. Froze in the winter and boiled in their cabs every summer.
Pushing the limits, they drove into the country's heartland, supplying goods and technology to an adolescent nation still in the process of discovering itself, beating the railroads at their own game.
Tom Stewart is representative of a dwindling number of truckers who opened Canada for business. They don't make drivers like him anymore.