Bob and I were married 34 years ago, in the small southwest Kansas town of Elkhart, where we raised our two daughters. Bob worked as a diesel mechanic for twenty years for a small fleet that had oilfield trucks, grain trucks, livestock trailers, and a few over the road trucks. Bob and I would fill in as drivers when needed and both acquired our class A licenses in our early twenties.
We started a part-time business repairing trucks in the evenings and on weekends. Bob and I were often found under a truck pulling a transmission, changing wheel seals, or changing brakes. I worked full time at our local county court house for 14 years starting as a mapping clerk in the Appraisers office, then moving on to supervisor of Date Processing Department.
As our last daughter was looking forward to leaving the nest and heading off to engineering school, Bob and I starting considering life changing decisions. We had been married young, we had not seen much of the United States, and driving was something we both enjoyed. One of the trucks Bob and I worked on was a show truck and in 1998 Bob attended his first Mid-America Truck Show in Louisville, KY and he was hooked. Now he had to convince me that there was trucking beyond the oil fields. We were again crewmembers on this truck when it was entered in the truck show at Las Vegas in 1998. During that truck show in Las Vegas, I was able to talk to a lot of drivers about their lives on the road and it did not take long until I was as hooked as Bob.
We had to wrap-up a few details in our lives before we could begin our driving careers. Due to the fact that both of us had only driven local we came to the decision that Bob could go to school and then he would train me. Bob attended a good school in Drumright, OK, then started as a driver with a large carrier. After he was finished with his trainer I joined him on the truck as a rider. It was not long until we became intrigued when we saw the husband and wife teams driving expedite straight trucks. We spent considerable time researching the expedited freight industry, bought our first Freightliner and entered the expedite industry in January of 2005.