Happy Thanksgiving! To mark the day, we're re-sharing the shot above from the Reader Rigs series highlighting your truck uploads to the gallery. This one's got a bit of a story behind it many of you will remember. The 379's owner-operator, Brandywine, West Virginia-based Patrick White, suffered a broken leg after an accident while loading his step deck back in the summer.
At the time, prospects for his business were uncertain, yet we checked in last week with his wife, Ashlyn White, who noted the Whites' pristine yellow 2001 379 is back to work with Patrick well on the mend.
Working "just a little slower than we were," Ashlyn said, with the Top Notch Transport owner-operator initially dipping back into trucking "hauling cattle, because it was easier on his leg, but now we are easing back into stepdeck work."
He hooks to a refrigerated trailer during "weeks he has bad days," she added.
[Related: Owner-operator's injury a stark reminder of trucking's danger]
With all the downtime associated with the injury, the Whites say they benefited with some help from lenders, but also "a good bit of help from a few close friends and our family. We are very grateful this year for sure."
Here's to giving thanks, and a big thanks to all of you for who you are and what you do.
Prime Pete 352 resurrected care of Criss Cross Trucking, Peasterbilt Customs, from father to son
Coolie Callahan's 1977 Peterbilt 352, parked up back in May at the Crossroads Truck Meet in California, Missouri.
The owner of the classic 352 Pete cabover above was gifted the rig as a project truck for his 22nd birthday by his bull-hauling father, Chuck Callahan, owner-operator of Jacksonville, Missouri-headquartered Criss Cross Trucking. The son, Coolie Callahan, brought it in May this year to the Crossroads Truck Meet for the second time over the last several years in part to show off recent further mods -- a new interior, principally, retooled to brown-and-cream to extend from the exterior paint scheme.
"We took it to McCoy's Upholstery in Shelbina," Callahan noted, around Christmas in 2024 to let the team there finish out the door and other interior panels and more. At the time of the May show when I saw the truck, Callahan had "picked it up either two or three weeks ago," he added. The previous interior was all original red button tuck but with plenty of wear.
The classic 352 certainly turned some heads on its way into the lot around the Horse and Buggy Accessories shop at the Crossroads plaza there for the show. And it's been a journey for the unit since Chuck Callahan bought the truck from a bull-hauling buddy in 2017, gifting it to his son after it'd sat in a field for well upward of a decade. It was last registered and licensed to work in 2002.
"It had plenty of mice living in it for, oh, I'm sure 20 years, you know, or 15," as Coolie put it. It then sat in the young man's driveway for a good long while before the Callahans turned it over to the proprietors at Peasterbilt Customs in Sweet Springs, Missouri, a couple years on in winter 2019. Regular readers will recall Peasterbilt's work on Gary Jones' 1984 362 cabover, featured here in Overdrive in 2022 after Jones and company showed it off at that year's Mid-America Trucking Show.
The rig's powered by the original Cummins Big Cam, 400 horse, which has been rebuilt and worked over plenty in its long life. The odometer's turned over a million likewise "at least once," Chuck Callahan said. In May it showed a couple hundred thousand.
The folks at Peasterbilt would ultimately have the rig for upward of a year, working it over front to back. "Everything but the motor and transmission," Coolie Callahan said. "They didn't touch the drive line."
Paint, custom headache rack, stacks, fenders, plenty of bodywork, and a frame stretch from quite short all the way out to the current 275-inch wheelbase.
A well-done work of art, no doubt, fit for what Callahan intends. "It's just a show truck," he said. "I may get a trailer to pull behind it, but never work it. Just a show trailer, a show truck." Fitting for a man who, though his father's example in trucking as an owner-operator goes back decades now, hasn't followed in those footsteps over-the-road himself.
He certainly gets the most out of his CDL and opportunties to drive the unit out to shows and elsewhere, and work on it isn't entirely done by any stretch. "It's neverending," Callahan said.
Next up? Sound system, lights on the interior. "It does still have the original radio" and speakers for over-the-air reception, he said. At once, when we talked in May he wasn't 100% certain whether the radio still worked or not, a marker of his generation in some ways.
"I haven't tried it," he said. When he drives it, he's been content with a Bluetooth speaker he's set up to play music and more through his smartphone to accompany the journey.
If we're lucky, maybe in 2026 at Crossroads we get to hear that new sound system. Best of luck to the Callahans.
[Related: SPB Trucking's custom 1984 Peterbilt 362 cabover]
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