10-4 Magazine October 2023

Going out on the road with their dad every chance they could, Eric and his brother Craig loved riding in the trucks. Tagging along with their dad on the weekends to the Freres yard, Eric and Craig would walk down the line of rigs, open the doors, and just dream about driving them one day. Eric graduated in 1989 (from the same school his dad graduated from) and then went to work at a local farm as the irrigation manager. While there he got to drive a few trucks in the fields and to the local cannery. Although he still had no CDL, nobody needed to teach him how to drive, he just figured it out on his own. Working at the farm for about a year, Eric got the chance to go work with his grandfather at the paving company. While there, he learned to drive the equipment, including the big paving machine. A couple years later, when Eric was 20, he and his grandfather got the oppor tunity to go work in Alaska. Star ting in Haines, AK and doing paving work at an airpor t, they later went nor thwest to Nome, AK (near the Bering Sea and just across the water from Russia) where Eric drove a huge dump truck for a gold mining operation. Removing the “overburden” (top dir t) and hauling it away until they reached the gold-laden “paydir t” below, which was taken to be sifted through in search of the gold, Eric was in Alaska for about a year (he turned 21 while he was there) before returning to Oregon. Upon his return to Oregon, Eric finally got his CDL and then went to work at the company his dad worked with for all those years – DH Trucking. Hired as a company driver at DH in 1992, his dad was there as an owner operator, so the two of them kind of worked together for a while. In August 1996, Eric left DH Trucking and star ted his driving career at Freres Lumber, where he remains today. He typically hauls Freres wood products (veneers) from their mill in Lyons down to southern Oregon to various plywood manufacturing plants, and then reloads at other nearby mills, hauling those products back up, then heads back to the yard to get ready for the next day. It might not sound like a lot, but Eric has rolled millions of miles on the trucks he has driven over the years at Freres. For most of the 27 years Eric has been at Freres, the fleet has been all Kenwor th trucks. Only lately, since new trucks are harder to get, have they bought a few Peterbilt 567s, but they are still in the test and see phase. Having all the trucks in your fleet basically the same (mostly Kenwor th T680s and T880s) makes stocking par ts and maintenance a lot easier. When Eric first got hired, they put him in an older, slightly worn out, single stack Kenwor th T800, which he drove for about a year, then he got a newer one, which he drove until 2004 and put half a million miles on. In 2004 he got his first brand-new truck – another Kenwor th T800 (Truck #78), which he drove for ten years and put a million 10-4 Magazine / October 2023 11