Driver for Landstar-leased fleet in Oprah magazine

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Shannon Oprah WitCleveland-based Shannon “Sputter” Smith (pictured, courtesy of Women in Trucking), a driver for a Landstar-leased small fleet, got into on-highway hauling as the youngest child of a father who worked on trucks for a living. As told by Jeanne Marie Laskas in Oprah magazine, her story is an inspiring one for any woman thinking of entering the business of trucking.

Telling her mechanic father that she was going to become a truck driver someday — in some sense in order to get a little closer to him — he of course told her she needed to learn how to work on a truck first.

Would he teach her? she wanted to know.

When he told her no, ultimately, she refused the answer and joined a military-transportation unit, learning the ropes of truck maintenance there.

Now 35, she’s got more than a decade of long-haul on-highway experience behind her, much of it accrued with no small debt to the quixotic energy she’s devoted to making her trucking life a reality. Laskas shares more than one such emblematic moment from her career in the piece, which you can read here.

The feature, says the Women in Trucking organization, of which Smith is a member, Laskas has been putting together toward a book “about people who work in the unrecognized jobs that support America.”

Find more about that via her website.