Former Apple House Trucking owner Eddie Karwaski started the business in 1963, buying a house at 3726 Birney Ave. in Moosic, Pa., from a man named Patty McAndrew, who had a wholesale produce stand on Lackawanna Ave. in Scranton. Hence, says Karwaski’s daughter, Maureen Rebar, the “apple house” name. Also, Karwaski ” added a garage onto it and originally packed apples and watermelons” as the principal business, which then grew into “hauling watermelons and other produce out of the South, primarily Florida.”
Rebar says she and her siblings — two brothers who were part of the trucking business in later years — imagined their father “would be sitting in the office in his chair at 82 years old still bossing people around.” As it turned out, however, Karwaski passed at 82 a year ago Tuesday this week, Feb. 26. I spoke with Rebar on the anniversary about her father, as she worked on amassing a collection of memorabilia of his decades in business hauling produce, including two spotlights in 1979 and 1981 issues of Overdrive.
The first, a Tractor of the Month profile, included the picture above of the original office location. The building was lost around the same time in a fire, as Rebar and the story itself note:
Rebar’s memory of her father’s time at the reins of the trucking business are of a man fully in control. “If you knew my dad, it was his say or no say,” she says. “He ran the business,” though with a partner who owned a small stake in it, “and he was the boss.”
He had his soft sides, too, Rebar notes. “He was very generous to the local Moosic community and he attended Catholic mass seven days a week.”
Generous to his company’s drivers, too, according to trucker Beth Howells, who along with her husband trucked for Karwaski and Apple House for many years. She calls him one heck of a boss, generous with his success to those who helped attain it. Karwaski “took tons of us to opening day at Daytona every year, paid for meals and motels” — and seats. “Good ones, too.”
