Chad Roberson, owner and operator of one-truck Chad Roberson Trucking out of Fairfield, Illinois, got his love for trucking at a very early age.
A third-generation truck driver, Roberson’s grandfather trucked until he was 82 years old and his father, Everett, drove until he was 67. Today, at 49, Chad Roberson is still trucking strong himself.
“I was raised around trucks since I was a kid, since I was born, and dad always had semis, and I was always in one,” he said.
His grandfather was a preacher who drove some on the side, while Everett was an owner-operator for many years until he passed away in 2007.
When Chad was growing up, his room was covered in pictures of trucks that he cut out of copies of Overdrive, delivered to his house in those days. In 1984, when Chad was 8 or 9, his mother reached out to Overdrive with a picture of Chad holding a picture of his dad’s truck -- a 1979 Freightliner at the time -- that he drew himself, with the backdrop of his bedroom wall covered in trucks he had cut from editions of the magazine.
Chad Roberson's picture was featured in the August 1984 edition. “My mom never told me she did it, so I had no idea until” the magazine showed up that month, he said. “She was like, ‘hey, you might want to check this out,’ and I was like, ‘holy cow!’ … I was as excited as ever.”
After spending much of his childhood on the road with his father, Chad accepted a basketball scholarship to Cincinnati Bible College, but after a stint there decided to “come home and go trucking, what my passion was about,” he said.
Getting started, he worked locally hauling grain, rock, coal, lime and other commodities in a hopper bottom. About six years into it, he went over-the-road pulling a hopper, eventually moving into step deck work, even hauling livestock. He said he’s done just about everything but car-hauling at this point in his career.
He got his own authority in 1994 as Chad Roberson Trucking and has been has been trucking ever since, apart from a year and a half he took off around the turn of the century. Today, Roberson pulls a reefer hauling cheese and other food and refrigerated products. He hauls a lot of produce out of Cobden, Illinois, going to Walmart distribution centers around the Midwest, in a 2019 Kenworth T680. He purchased the truck in June as a part-time worker until he’s done fixing up his pride and joy -- the 2000 Kenworth W900 that was the final truck his dad owned before he passed away.
When Everett ordered the truck, Roberson's mom, Marsha, had picked out the yellow paint scheme for it. She passed away in 2004 at 57 years old from a heart attack, then three years later, Everett passed away from colon cancer.
He still owed some money to the bank on the truck when he passed, and Chad said “mentally I was not in a good state” when the bank asked what he wanted to do about it.
“Do what you gotta do with it,” he ended up telling the bankers. They sold it, and he lost track of it shortly thereafter.
'Somebody upstairs had a lot to do with this'
Fast-forward to 2022 at the Mid-America Trucking Show in Louisville, Kentucky. Roberson’s wife asked him if he ever wondered about his dad’s truck, and where it was.
“It had a lot of sentimental value,” Roberson said. “This truck is on my mom and dad’s tombstone.”
All he knew was that when it was sold in 2007, it went out West, and that was about it. When he got back home, he was scrolling through Facebook Marketplace, he said, not “trying to find anything or to look for anything,” but when scrolling through, “next thing I know, I see this truck and I thought, ‘This thing looks really familiar.’”
He read through the description and came to the realization that he very well may have been looking at his dad’s old truck. His wife was skeptical, but he told her “I can tell by the pinstriping,” it had a Signature 600 Cummins, 18-speed, the same yellow paint. The only big change was the owner had painted the fenders purple.
Roberson said the listing had been posted just a half hour before he stumbled across it.
“I really think a lot that somebody upstairs had a lot to do with this, because we were just discussing it the day before,” he said.
He gave the seller a call and found out it was a younger couple selling it, strange considering he recalled an older man had bought it from the bank. Talking to the couple and telling them his story about the rig and its history with his family, they explained their neighbor had owned it, and he had bought it from the bank. He moved back to South America, and they bought the truck off of him since they were neighbors. They told Roberson they didn’t really need the truck, though. He got them to send him the VIN and he confirmed that the truck was, in fact, his dad’s last truck.
“We negotiated the price, and two weeks later I flew out to Medford, Oregon. They picked me up, and I drove the truck home.”
He took it to a mechanic and checked everything out, and he started working it in his operation. This past summer, though, Roberson decided to start redoing it, repainting it and generally fixing it up.
“That truck was away from us for 15 years … and the guy had only put like 300,000 miles on it in 15 years,” Roberson said. “It was one of the coolest things that’s ever happened to me to realize that I could get dad’s last ride. And like I said, it’s on my mom and dad’s tombstone. It’s just, it’s amazing. It’s in the family to stay until I die, I guess.”
As for the rebuild, Roberson has mixed emotions about what to do with the color, whether to repaint it yellow or change it completely. He said his “favorite Crayon is black,” but if he were to paint the truck black, he'd go with a yellow frame and yellow striping to pay homage to his forebears.
If he keeps it yellow, he’ll go all in and paint the frame yellow, too, instead of the original black.
“I’m not gonna do a whole lot -- all I’m gonna do is repaint it,” he said. “Cosmetics-wise, I put new stacks, I put new tanks. I mean, I’ve got it dressed out really nice. I’ve been driving it since I bought the truck in 2022.”
As shown, the truck was originally all yellow -- a color his mother, Marsha, picked out. Most of Everett's trucks had been blue, but for this truck, he let his wife pick the color. "Mom's favorite color was yellow because she always loved yellow roses, and she picked out a really beautiful yellow. ... That's why it's emotional for me to say that maybe I may change the color. Mom picked it out, but I would still incorporate that same color into the frame if I went black."
The owner-operator's got plans for a few shows. “One of dad’s best things that he ever wanted in life was to make ... the calendar for Shell Rotella,” he said. “That was the only thing he ever wanted to do, if he ever could. My dad was a diehard truck driver. Everybody knew he was a true truck driver of truck drivers.”
With that in mind, Roberson hopes to get the truck to an upcoming Shell Rotella SuperRigs show, with the goal of hopefully being selected as one of the 12 trucks to make the calendar.
“That would be the icing on the cake of everything I’ve ever dreamed of,” he said.
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