Owner-operator Jimmy Ardis of Sumter, S.C., leased to Moultrie, Ga.-based Sapp Trucking, learned to drive “in a 1971 International 4070 cabover with a 250 Cummins in it,” he says, running to the West Coast and back. He’d driven farm tractors prior to that. “I pretty well had it mastered by the time I went over the road.
This might be a story emblematic of so many owner-operators’, but for the fact that, as is well evident in the photo here, Ardis lost his left arm at the age of six to cancer. Against the odds, this year at the Mid-America Trucking Show in Louisville, Ky., the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association will present Ardis with an award acknowledging his now 4 million miles of safe driving. “It is a pretty big milestone in my life,” he says. “I have walked amongst the best of the best now.”
And what a milestone it is, given that at age six in Oklahoma, Ardis was at one point not expected to reach his next birthday. “I had sarcoma cancer,” he says. “I had an uncle in med school at the University of Oklahoma. He’d picked me up by my arm, and when he did I passed out. They rushed me to a joint clinic in Oklahoma City — I remember it like it was yesterday.”
Doctors did exploratory surgery on Ardis, telling his parents they didn’t like what they were seeing — “When we go in, if we have to, we’re going to take his arm off,” they said.
The young Ardis never let it beat him, though. Records he received when his doctor in Oklahoma passed away several years ago show that doctors at one point estimated he may not make it past two weeks. Then they scheduled a six-month follow-up appointment. All clear. Then another six months. Pretty soon years had gone by without a single recurrence.
His early voyage into over-the-road truck driving hit a bump when at age 19 “they caught me driving,” he says. The fact that he didn’t have an arm disqualified him from running interstate with a chauffer’s license, but he determined early on that “I’m not going away, I’m going to drive a truck,” he says.
