"I polish my truck myself," Bower says of his 2003 Western Star Low Max, noting that a clean truck doesn't need a lot of chrome accessories to look fierce cruising down the road.

Leonard Bower fondly recalls bouncing up and down in the passenger seat of his dad’s 1969 Diamond Reo cabover. He’s known the route from Pennsylvania to Texas since he was 12. “We rode there and back six times in one summer,” the Harrisburg, Pa., native says. “My love for traveling developed out of those rides.”

By age 24, he bought his first truck, a 1977 Kenworth A, and was eager to see the rest of the country. “Back in those days I couldn’t stay out long enough, Bower says. “I was very adventurous. I had to see what was around the next curve.”

That love of travel included going around curves on Harley-Davidson Dressers for many years. He owned four new ones between 1987 and 1992, even honeymooning on his Hog in 1992 with his bride, Jill Bower, out West.

“For five years, every year, we’d go out West for three weeks and get on the back roads,” Bowers said of he and his wife’s motorcycle trips. Eventually Jill bought her own Harley. “People thought we were crazy. Oh, yeah, we loved it.”

Now that he and Jill have three children – and have sold their Hogs – Bower values his time at home. When he took a long-haul lease with Mercer Transportation last year, it took a toll, he says.

“The longest I was away was two months – April and May – with only three days at home,” he says. As his most lucrative freight routes began dropping, Bower re-evaluated priorities. This September, he took a job hauling regional loads of steel coil and plates for Rushville, Ind.-based Fraley and Schilling, at a time when few companies were hiring.

His longtime friend and owner-operator colleague Sam Young says he understands why. “His overall knowledge of trucking is what’s gotten him this far.”