My Long Road to Long Hauling
Growing up on a farm near Matheson in Northern Ontario I learned there was no real difference between “men’s work” and “women’s work”. My maternal grandmother worked in the bush cutting fire wood for sale.
My mom worked alongside my dad on the farm, in the field harvesting hay and in the barn milking cows and cleaning the barn by hand because there was no hydro power to our farm.
We used horses to work the farm and in the bush skidding logs. I was home schooled during the winter and I would go to the bush with my dad when I was about 8 years old to help with the log skidding, as pulling a log is very dangerous I would ride the horse and hitch and unhitch the chain, little did I think that some 35 years later I would need to know how to hook a skid chain to drag a load off my trailer in Ida Grove IA! Where an older man who was pulling the parts off my trailer commented as he watched me hook the chain said “You’ve skidded logs, haven’t you ma’am”
When I got married I learned to operate the heavy equipment that my husband owned, this included different farm tractors, loaders and a TD6 crawler that was used to do custom plowing for other farmers. We had 5 children and my husband left us in the winter of 1970.There were not many jobs around the area at that time, so I knew I would have to move and find a better way of making a living for me and the kids who ranged from 3 to 12 years.My sister Barb lived near Barrie, ON and she suggested I move there and look for work, this was May 1971 and Barrie had many jobs available, so I decided to give it a shot.
My 3 older kids were still in school so my mom and my other sister Opal offered to take care of them till school was out and I headed south.
I thought I would have no problem getting a job on construction because I was a good loader operator but Barrie wasn’t as progressive as the North, so I went to work in a factory.
I also knew to move forward I would have to upgrade my education beyond grade 8. I started taking classes at Georgian college and working a part time/full time job. I got my GED and was taking a bookkeeping course, because I was good with numbers, not because I liked the course, when one of my classmates, Joyce Winters suggested I should drive tractor trailers, ya right I thought, all I wanted to do was get a decent paying job because my 5 kids wanted to live indoors and eat every day!
But, sometimes the path is chosen for you. One day I was driving home from school and I saw transport trucks with “George Brown College” turning around in the plaza in Angus I didn’t even know there was truck driving schools.
I thought I’ll have to call them and get some info sometime, and went home to have supper with my kids because I had a job 3 nights a week Wed, Fri & Sat at the Barrie Race track from 7 to midnight.
On my way back into Barrie I see the same trucks parked at a little restaurant along county road 90 ( its long gone ) I thought ok God I can take a hint so I stopped and ended up signing up for a 6 week Saturday course starting in November.
The course cost $250.00 I borrowed the money from my brother Robert and started on this new adventure.
I knew it wouldn’t be easy because I had a day job as well as working the 3 nights from 7 to midnight.
I thought all it takes is time management working 18 hours on Friday and needing to be on Cherry St docks in Toronto for 8 a.m Saturday morning would make for a short sleep night but I would have Sunday off so it would be doable. My friend Hilda offered to keep an eye on my kids and I took my first steps on this long road.
I was the only woman in the classes but because of my background I had a lot more real experience than most of the guys and got along really well.
November 1974 I earned my AZ license, it would be 11 years before I entered the long haul world.
I took a bus driving course and started driving school and city bus but kept thinking about getting a chance to use my AZ license.
One morning in May 1976 I was driving past Cooks Construction yard and saw a dump truck sitting on the pad, I thought that was strange because I knew they were very busy, so I went in and asked who I needed to talk to about a driving job (I didn’t know they didn’t have women drivers) I was told to talk to Ron in the scale shack. When I went in I asked Ron “Why is that truck sitting out there?”
“What’s it to you?” he said. “Well if you need a driver you could hire me”
He told me that he wasn’t sure what was happening but to leave my name and call him back about noon and he’d let me know what was going on.
Instead of calling I showed up wearing work clothes and work boots I had my lunch kit and gloves and said “Well?”
Ron just looked at me for a minute and then he asked me what my name was and if I knew where their pit was on the tenth, I did, He told me to take the truck up there and the pit foreman would tell me what he needed done, no application no road test!!!
I was REALLY glad that he didn’t road test me because when I climbed into that truck I found something I had never encountered before. A 2 stick 20speed powered by a gasoline engine. I knew if I went back in to ask Ron how to drive this truck I wouldn’t get the job and it paid over $8.00 an hour, more then I’d ever earned before so I spent a few minutes looking things over.
I had earned my AZ on a 13 speed road ranger and had driven many different types of standard transmissions.
Anyway long story short I got the truck up to the pit and ended up working for them for two seasons. I was the first woman driver for Cooks. The overpasses north of Barrie on 11 are my reminder of the time I worked for them. I was never treated any different than any other new driver if I didn’t know how to do something I asked and was always told and shown respectfully.
Because the work dropped off to almost nothing during the winter I was on EI when I got a call from my counselor about a job working on the snowplow for MTO out of Barrie.
I went and was hired as a wing operator again the first female driver the men accepted me without any problem but they joked that they couldn’t call me a wingman so they called me the wing nut. I took this in the way it was intended as a welcome not a put down.
In the spring I went back to driving city bus because there was no night shift and the pay wasn’t bad but I didn’t like the job.On one of my routes I passed Suburban Tank Lines on Penetanguishene St, where they also sold Western Star trucks (my dream truck back then) so on my day off I decided to check them out. One of the men in the garage directed me to the office where I found a young man behind the desk. I thought I would try the same “shock” method I’d used at Cooks.
I said “If I come to work here do I get to drive a Western Star or are they just for sale?” He looked at me as if I had fallen thru the roof. I told him what experience I had and he said “leave me your information and I’ll get back to you”.
I thought that would be the end of that, but at about 8:30 that night he called me! “Were you serious” he asked. “As a heart attack” I said.
We got together to discuss the job and I found out some of his drivers were giving him a hard time, he was taking over for his dad and they questioned a lot of his decisions, I would be the buffer the men couldn’t very well complain if a woman was doing the job, I went in took a road test and was teamed with the senior driver. Gord never asked me why as woman I wanted to learn to “yank tanks” he just wanted to help me get ready to do the job.
When Gord thought I was ready I was hired as a spare driver, that ment I would be driving a different truck every day. The company had 2 tractor trailer units pulled by a Mack and a Western Star and a straight truck so there was a lot of variety.
This job was the best for learning to back up in difficult situations.
These were “shotgun” tanks that means they had no baffles so the wash would move the truck forward if you braked hard and you had to learn to shift with the wash moving forward in the tank.
I learned a lot and met some interesting people.
This part of my driving career only lasted a few months because I was offered a job at a new plant Rockwell International that was supposed to last 10 years, it offered full benefits and paid well.
I thought it would be better for my family so in the fall of 1979 I was hired as the first woman on the shop floor. Having a woman on the shop floor didn’t sit well with some of the older foremen that came with the plant when it was moved from Quebec so again I had to prove myself.
I had applied as a Quality Control inspector, because I had earned certificates while working at other factory jobs, but I had to spend 3 months running a lathe which taught me a lot about the product, we machined pipeline valves of all sizes.
When I was finally moved off the line I became receiving inspector which I enjoyed because it meant following the valves as they moved through the shop.This 10 year job ended after 2 ½ years 50 of us were laid off in Jul
My next job was with Purolator driving a straight truck in Toronto and making some trips to various places like Kingston and Sudbury,
Then one night I went to work and they were short one AZ driver I told them I had an AZ and I was on my way to Montreal with 10 other trucks to do a switch.
I was there for over 2 years and the job paid well but the hours were unreliable one week I’d get 60 hours and then only one trip for a couple of weeks, that made it very hard to budget.
In the summer of 1985 I caught a severe case of pneumonia and was off work for 4 weeks and even with that time off I could barely drive, so I took vacation time to recoup. We often get steered in certain directions by unrelated occurrences.
I had a friend who had spent a few years living in Florida and North Carolina and we decided to take a road trip so we packed a tent and a few supplies and away we went it was wonderful! I returned home with a desire to travel the U.S in a tractor trailer.
When I got home I went back to driving for Purolator but started sending out resumes to companies looking for cross border drivers. They all wanted drivers with cross border experience, but finally I found a company who offered to train me, YESSSSS!!!
I made an appointment and because I really knew nothing about the industry and how some companies operated I showed up to do this “training” in Mississauga for 8 a.m.
I took all my info and got there early and spent the next several hours waiting in the driver’s room.
Finally this guy comes out of the office (I later learned he was the owner) and asked me if I knew were a certain warehouse was. I told him if I had an address I could find it. He said take the day cab and pick up a loaded trailer and bring it back to the yard.
I did. I asked “When am I getting my road test? He said that was it.
And then he said “By the way, if you want this job that load has to be in Calumet City IL in the morning” I asked what truck I was taking he told me the day cab! I had no idea where Calumet City was! He handed me a bunch of papers and said that the driver in the yard would me help fill these out, his name is Chris. So much for Cross border training. Back then the drivers had to fill out all their own paperwork and clear the load at the border.
Chris helped me fill out the paperwork and told me to write down all the info he gave me so I would be able to do it on my own.
Not knowing that I would be going on a trip I hadn’t brought anything with me no clothing or bedding or map book or extra money!
But I was determined not to let him beat me so away I went I was lucky I could follow Chris on this trip and when we stopped for coffee I called the company and asked the boss “Where do I sleep?” He told me to look behind the seat the last driver left a board there. We got to Calumet City (it’s on the south east edge of Chicago about 480 miles from the yard) about 3a.m. I went to check in with the security guard a big old black man, I asked him if it was safe to sleep here and he gave me the best piece of advice I ever got in all the years I drove. He said “If you keep your doors locked, your windows up and your mouth shut, your safe almost anywhere”. He couldn’t believe my boss had sent me all that way in that old day cab!
This is in late October and it gets cold at night in Illinois! Even with the truck running it was a long 4 hours trying to sleep on a board across the seats with no blankets!!
The next morning we got unloaded and I was on my own.
The “Good old days” were not so good in a lot of ways!
This company cared nothing for their drivers and I was to find this out in the next few days. I was unable to be dispatched home for about a week, and they would only pay for a motel room about every 3 days.
I didn’t even know that a driver cannot log sleeper berth unless the truck actually had a sleeper berth!
Anyway when I got home I was glad to get a change of clothes and packed a duffle, I also took the board home and padded it with foam and put a cover on it so it was a little more comfortable.
I got on a fairly regular run between Meadville PA to Collingwood ON, hauling glass this worked out well because it gave me a chance to get more comfortable with the paperwork and border crossing, but this load always got inland clearance at the customer instead of at the border. This worked out well until the night I arrived in driving rain storm. I grabbed my raincoat and the load papers and ran it to talk to the onsite Customs officer he could do one of two things.
Stamp my paperwork or come out and cut the customs seal on my trailer, the driver was not allowed to break a customs seal without having stamped paperwork.
Up until this load the weather had always been dry and the officer always came out and cut the seal but this time it was pouring rain.
He refused to stamp my customs paper so I went back out and sat in the truck, after a while he came out and cut the seal.
I immediately opened the doors and backed into the dock, got unloaded and thought everything was cool, when I got back to the yard I was to find out how vindictive this officer was. He had put in a complaint about me! I told my company that if I had broken the seal without a stamp on my paperwork that officer could have fined me!
The boss told me to wait in the driver’s room until they decided what to do about this.
While I was waiting I started reading the “drivers wanted” in the Sun newspaper back then there were dozens!
A little 2 line ad caught my eye a company was looking for a team to run Texas and Vancouver. My friend had been laid off and had been driving straight truck around Barrie so I called him and asked if he wanted to drive team he said o.k. I called this company to ask if the job was still available the dispatcher asked if we could be in Dallas TX for Monday (it was now Friday) I said no problem! He gave me the address and I told him we would be at the yard 8 am Saturday morning to get dispatched.
The best part was when I was called back into the office to receive my punishment for refusing to break the law.
The safety guy told me they had decided to give me 3 days off because I had upset a big customer.
I said “Could you give me more than 3 days because while I was waiting I got another job and I need to be in Dallas TX for Monday, I don’t think I can be back here in 3 days.”I laid my keys on the desk, the look on their faces PRICELESS! I had worked for this company for 3 weeks basically on no sleep but I had learned how to get loads across the border! I went home all excited I was going to Texas!
We got stuff packed up bought some supplies and left home early Saturday morning to go to TEXAS! When we got to the office to meet our new boss, Matt we were in for a surprise, the trip had been changed from Texas to Vancouver B.C with 4 drops Winnipeg, Edmonton an 2 in Vancouver.
Because neither of us knew P from putty about this stuff we took the load, now we’re going much farther over snowy roads and would be running through the mountains in B.C. Well this would be a new experience I had never run the mountains.
Our truck was a rental from Ryder a GMC General with a 27’’ coffin bunk and no jake brake, I had no experience with bunks or jakes but we got hooked up and headed out.
Because we were now headed northwest instead of south we had to stop by my house for warmer clothes, as we were running up the 400 I asked my friend how much experience he had pulling a
trailer he said “I’ve never actually pulled a trailer” I was so stunned I couldn’t even get mad, I just pulled over and told him to change seats. We were lucky he was a fast learner.
I drove the #1 highway by crawling down the steeper grades and being cursed at by most of the log haulers in B.C.
I learned a lot on this trip and also found the worst shower in all the truck stops I came across in the next 30+ years, it was so cold the shower mat was frozen to the floor, but since I had no experience with truck stop showers I thought this was normal.
Our return load had us picking up in Washington state U.S and taking it to New Jersey (interstateing ) but what did we know!
Getting down Cabbage Mountain was an experience I stopped at the top and went down in a low gear because it’s all switch backs, in some places you can see several sections of the highway below!
We stopped at a Flying J in Utah below Cabbage Mountain for a break and took some pictures and had lunch. I noticed the other drivers were starting to talk about a storm that was coming, we headed out and got to Evanston WY where we shut down for the night at a little truck stop. The next morning we woke up to a world buried in 3 ft of snow! Highway 80 over the 3 Sisters mountain was closed there was 70 trucks stuck on it, so we were confined to the truck stop till things changed.
We were there for 3 days, had to wait till the chain law was lifted because we carried no chains. The company trucks I drove never carried chains so in all the time I drove I never chained up, though I was in a couple of situation where they would have come in handy,,, like the next day.
That was my introduction to long hauling I think a lot of people would have packed it in but 30+ years later I was still curious to see what would happen on the next trip.

STAY TUNED FOR MORE STORIES FROM BEV WHO BEGAN HER CAREER IN 1965