Trucker Talk: By John & Kim Jaikes When you’ve been on the road for over four decades you know a lot of people. The odds of meeting up with someone you knew back in the early days of your career gets less and less as the years go by. Four years ago, while at the Waupun Truck-N-Show, I started up a conversation with Wyatt Sperry. His dad Chris had entered his truck in the show and Wyatt had polished it. While we were chatting, it finally clicked – I looked at his thick red hair and his last name and put it all together. Back in the late 1980s, when we were driving for Freymiller, I was in Chicago and our friend Roger “Big Red” Sperry’s engine blew up and he needed a ride back home to Wisconsin. I still remember that trip – my sister-in-law was running with me that week and we were able to help Red get home. He was able to help us, as well. My reefer ran out of fuel, and he helped me get it primed and running, so I could go load cheese. Helping each other was just the way we rolled back then. Wyatt went over to his dad after our conversation and asked him who Big Red was. Chris told him that it was his grandpa (Wyatt had never heard him called that before). Later that night, Chris called his dad, and we got to reminisce a little about way back when. We compared notes on old friends and if we knew where they were and, sadly, some have passed away. Roger Sperry, Wyatt’s grandfather, had a construction business he worked at during the day and he would haul loads of cattle at night to Madison, WI, Cedar Rapids, IA and Milwaukee, WI. He was even a county sheriff for a while before he went from enforcing the law to bending it a bit sometimes. To supplement his income as a dairy farmer, Don Freymiller began his driving career as a short-haul cattle trucker in Shullsburg, WI. He started out with one truck and a vision and built it to a company of over 800 trucks when we were there. One day Don asked his friend Roger if he was looking for a job, saying, “I have a truck for you.” And the rest is history. Roger lease purchased a 1980 K-100 single bunk cabover Kenworth, powered by a white not yellow 3406A CAT engine, from Don, and then hit the road, pulling a refrigerated trailer, running from Wisconsin and Chicago to California. We had a few friends who got their start at Freymiller in their lease purchase program and then went on to become successful owner operators. The fleet was made up of cabover Kenworths, in the early days, before they converted to Freightliners. There was a group of drivers from Wisconsin, Illinois and Iowa that would regularly run together and oftentimes see each other at the terminal on Union Avenue in Bakersfield, CA. While we were talking, Roger remembered Don had a few cars for the drivers to use when they were at the terminal so they could get something to eat, do laundry or get supplies at Walmart. The hand tooled leather logbook covers that Freymiller awarded to their “drivers of the month” are beautiful, and Roger still has his, as he never used it, keeping it in the pristine condition he received it. Roger worked for Freymiller from 1981-1989 when he parked the truck and went back to the construction business. In 1988 he decided to cover over the Freymiller blue with a coat of gray paint and “Old 807” got a new look for the last two years she ran there. The white rims got a coat of gray paint, as well, until the winter that year when she got aluminum rims – she was walking in tall cotton. Roger, Chris and I shared some good memories of what it was like back then. Different truck stops offered a free steak dinner with an oil change. We all had our favorite places to stop along the way. Some of the places we went were not so much fun like the Chicago Water Market, of course, in Chicago, and Kurt 70 10-4 Magazine / July 2025 THREE GENERATIONS
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjA1MjUy