It's long been a feature of the day to day of my work here with Overdrive, whose history extends back now six decades to a time well before my own birth, much less my own family's touch points with trucking – my father was a dispatcher for a short time with a mostly unionized carrier out of Spartanburg, South Carolina, as a young man, before a career whose bulk was spent in industrial water and wastewater treatment. Cousins among his extended family up in North Carolina were owner-operators when I was a kid and deregulation was having its ways with long-entrenched business models, enterprising owners with a willingness and ability to adapt among those who would come out of the 1980s and 1990s with the upper hand.
While all that was going on, trucks were being bought and sold, kids born, growing into adulthood enamored of the truck technology of their time and/or their parents' and grandparents' time, as the case may be. Owner-operator businesses were built following patterns handed down, and/or passed down from generation to generation themselves, and Overdrive was busy covering it all.
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Even later, often enough such a request would involve a family reaching back into the legacy of a loved one who'd passed on – such was the case with the story of Eddie Karwaski, small fleet owner of the Apple House outfit running out of Pennsylvania for many years. I spoke with his daughter in winter 2019 on the anniversary of his passing in 2018, as she attempted to amass a collection of memorabilia of his decades in business hauling produce, including two spotlights in 1979 and 1981 issues of Overdrive. This rig of Karwaski's, a then virtually brand-new 1979 KW, was Tractor of the Month in March of 1979, and a picture we helped his family track down in 2019 at the time of this story.
Karwaski's daughter remembered her father’s time at the reins of the trucking business as one 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.” Yet he had his soft sides, too. “He was very generous to the local 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.”
As with so many small trucking businesses, both of Karwaski's sons were involved in various ways, from hauling to running parts of the back office and shop. And there are many other such stories that have been the bread and butter of Overdrive's highlighting of the culture of trucking through the years, built on family – either hereditary or the family of shared affinity for the business, increasingly apparent today as online networks work to chip away at the old boundaries of place.
For today's edition of our Monday 60th-anniversary dispatches, I've collected just a few examples. Follow links in the caption to each photo that follows to read through the multigenerational history embodied within each story.
Success, failure, and tryin' again with Carl Rhodes and Tronagun ... | Longtime owner-operator and Tronagun (after
