What I'll call the law of the third generation in trucking is older than the fifth wheel. The old man gets the company started, the son builds on what the old man began, and the spoiled grandkids tear it all down. Anyone who has been out here for six months can recite two or three examples of the phenomenon.
But that variation on the old shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations adage about squandering a bootstrapped family legacy isn't by any means universal. I once spoke to a trucking company executive out of Wisconsin whose family had been in the reefer business for more than a century. There was no C-suite air about him. Bedecked in Harley regalia, he was 100% trucker to the core. Here's how he explained his family's fleet's longevity: “The old man had a rule that you had to own your own rig for six years before you could come into the office." Why six years? I didn’t think to ask. It was just a random conversation on his LTL dock in New Jersey.
But maybe it just takes six years' worth of dirt beneath your fingernails to really know what’s going on.
Then you’ve got Turnage and Sons out of Tylertown, Mississippi, now in the Turnage family's fifth generation of milk hauling. If the Wharton School was ever to do a case study in how to make a family business thrive for that long, these small fleet owners would be a pretty good place to start. I caught up with Robbie Turnage and his son, Levi, a while back at the Mid-America Trucking Show to hear their story.
Robbie (left) and Levi Turnage
Robbie’s great grandfather, Q.D. Turnage, began hauling milk the old fashioned way, performing the backbreaking work of schlepping 10-gallon cans onto a trailer.
Among trucks operated by Q.D. Turnage. This one's a 1978 vintage Peterbilt 359, and a future restoration project for the Turnage and Sons small fleet.
“My grandpa started back in the day hauling cans,” Robbie said. "He was a stocky little fellow, but he was strong as an ox. We just grew up in it."
Like father like son for Robbie and Levi, the former added. Levi "pretty much just grew up into it, too. It’s kind of a dying breed in our area, but we’re still giving it as much fits as we can.”
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“I was up under [a] truck in diapers.”
--Levi Turnage
When I asked Robbie for the secret to the company's longevity, he said it starts at home and in the shop. The trucking company is a literal extension of their family, and they strive to impart a strong working knowledge of mechanics from one generation to the next.
“Most everything is family-oriented,” Robbie said. Gesturing to the driver parked up next to us in the lot, he added, “Even our driver sitting beside us, Alan, you know. He’s part of our family. We take care of him, and he takes care of us. Everything we do, everyone in my office is my family, everyone working in my shop is family. I’ve got one boy who’s working in my shop who isn’t a family member, but everyone else is. So if it wasn’t for us being able to turn wrenches, overhaul motors, transmissions, rear ends, doing ninety percent of our own work, we probably wouldn’t have been able to make it past three generations, either. The price of getting trucks worked on out on the road is just outrageous.”
For Levi, the fifth-generation contingent of Turnage and Sons, his apprenticeship in the family shop predated kindergarten.
“I was up under [a] truck in diapers, helping my dad work," he said. "I was just born into it. I wouldn’t change a single thing about it." When he was in school, he "worked in the shop every summer. ... I’d rather be working in the shop than going on vacation; this is my happy place. I enjoy every bit of it.”
Robbie recalls his son's toddler truck-mechanic days with pride: "He was in a onesie crawling on a piece of cardboard under a truck with me pulling wires out of an '88 Pete when we first got started. He’s been in it ever since. I ain’t gonna lie. I preached to him from the time he was in sixth grade all the way up to graduating to go to college -- ‘Getcha a Monday through Friday job. I’ll give you the title to the truck. You can just have it to play with.'"
Levi didn't heed his dad's advice. "He's just like me," Robbie said. "He’s got diesel and oil flowing through his veins. He’s been in the shop every summer for the last six years. I can task him with anything."
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We were standing by the Turnage and Sons 2005 Peterbilt 379 "Big Red" (pictured above), showing out in the MATS lot. "The motor in this truck blew up Friday before we come," Robbie said, who started on repairs at "10 o’clock Friday morning," his son right by his side. "Saturday afternoon we fired it up, Sunday we cleaned it up, and we made it to the show on Monday. I’m confident he can tear anything down and put it back together. He’s 19 years old, and he knows it.
"If we get a farmer that calls at one o’clock in the morning with an agitator broke, if he’s at the house, it’s ‘Boy, get up, put your pants on. Time to go to work.' He gets up. He goes. He loads the milk and brings it back to the yard. That’s the same way I was brought up. I was 14 ... driving a truck. They’d call at one or two o’clock in the morning. Grandpa would tap me on the shoulder. ‘Hey, go get so and so.’"
Levi plans on making milk-hauling his life’s work, “as long as the milk keeps going like it’s going," he said. "I have a good feeling it’s going to keep providing for this family well.”
Levi's 2005 "Big Red" 379 later in the show would take home second place in the MATS Paul K. Young truck show's Working Truck -- Company Owned category. The truck boasts a 1,200-horse twin turbo Caterpillar C-15 motor with an 18 speed and 2.64 rears. As noted above, just one week before the show the motor was torn down and in pieces.
More in Long Haul Paul Marhoefer's "Faces of the Road" series of profiles, oral histories.
