At the Mid-America Trucking Show this past year, Andrea Hensley entered the press room. Owner of a livestock-hauling support business, Hensley had made time to visit Louisville to, among other things, see owner-operator Darrell Estes' restoration of her renowned father's past personal 359, a mechanical Cat-powered 1984 model.
Here's Estes at MATS with the beauty, a 1984 Peterbilt 359, which you can catch plenty more views of in the video at bottom.
Hensley, with an understated elegance belying her bona fides as an heiress to a type of trucking aristocracy, recalled what it was like to be the daughter of that renowned fleet owner, Glenn “Pillsbury” Hensley. She offered first this tale from her distant past.
“I was probably seven or eight," she said. "I was a little girl. It would be payday. He'd be paying the drivers. He would show me the breakdowns. He would actually lose money [sometimes] by paying them, but because they were good drivers, he'd want to keep them. He’d say, ‘This is how you do business. This is how it works.’"
Pillsbury would make sure she "did the math," she said. "He'd say, 'Look, this is how I lost money on this load.'
“But you can't do that forever.”
Glenn Hensley got his start in 1960 as an owner-operator with one truck. "Every time he paid off a truck, he would buy another one," his daughter said. That way, he slowly grew the company, and by the 1990s he "had 25 trucks that ran dry vans and reefers from Kentucky to the North and South.”
