The 70-year career of a 'trucking legend,' from OTR out of Western Canada to sales in Nashville

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Nashville, Tennessee-based Ken Greff, in this week's edition of Overdrive Radio, tells the tales of the early years of his seven-decade career in and around trucking, a sizable portion of it spent in truck sales in Tennessee. Yet Greff got his start behind the wheel far away from the U.S. Southeast in Western Canada, driving and owning trucks in a variety of operations. And Greff, 88 today, sounds like many an OTR hauler when he reflects on one regret: "My family never came first. It should have been, but my job was always first," he told new podcast host and McMahon Truck Centers area manager Corey Price, who lives due East of Nashville near Cookeville, Tennessee.

Howes logoOverdrive Radio's sponsor is Howes, longtime provider of fuel treatments like its Howes Diesel Treat anti-gel to get your ready for winter, likewise its all-weather Diesel Defender, among other products.Price interviewed Greff for the first episode of a podcast he’s calling, simply, β€œTrucking Legends,” an old-school-trucking podcast he envisions as a repository to preserve the stories, the knowledge, the wisdom of those who’ve been in the business going way back.

Price has known Greff since his own days as lead man in the Music City chapter of the American Truck Historical Society, and Greff served as a sales mentor to him when he took his first truck-sales job at an International dealer in Cookeville. Along the way, Price, a truck and trucking history enthusiast since he was a kid, got to know Greff’s past a good bit better -- it stretches all the way back to World War II times when, shortly thereafter, as a teenager, he got his start trucking via a little bit of a subterfuge on the part of his mother, as you’ll hear in the episode.

Overdrive RadioSubscribe to the podcast on your listening platform of choice for early access to the weekly Overdrive Radio series -- it drops typically every Friday to the feed and follows here at OverdriveOnline.com and in Overdrive's Youtube and Facebook feeds the following week. You can subscribe for first access via Apple and Google podcasts, Spotify, TuneIn, most anywhere you listen.(Greff's history includes his first part-owned truck, the early-1950s White Western Star pictured in the thumbnail image for this episode, tales of mountain downgrades with among the first Jake brakes on trucks in Western Canada, cross-country hauls at the age of 16 to NYC and back west, and more..) As noted, Greff's story is excerpted from the first edition of what Corey Price hopes will eventually be a monthly podcast.

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Along the way, as we run through Greff’s early days trucking toward how he got from driving and owning rigs in Western Canada to sales in Middle Tennessee, we’ll hear more from Price, too, on his motivation for creating the podcast: 

If you've got a tip on a veritable trucking legend you feel like Price ought to feature, he asks that you let him know via his emailAlso in the podcast: Ken Greff's younger brother played a part in his move to Middle Tennessee in the late 1960s. After playing in a band together as young men, Ken's brother, Ray, decided he would dedicate his life to music. He would go on to a big Nashville career as Ray Griff, penning and performing well-known tracks such as one Ken talks about a little in this podcast, "Baby," embedded below. Also: Price himself is a truck owner -- hear more about his brilliant blue 1986 Mack cabover, likewise pictured in the thumbnail for this week's podcast, in the episode.  

[Related: History in his grasp with 1978 W900A on '96 Dodge chassis, '46 Brockway, more: K&D's Adam Johnson]

Transcript

Ken Greff: I hate to admit it, but I never did spend much time with my own family. My dad, I was told he was from Holland. He was told that he was always number one and I hate to say it, but it rubbed off on me and my family never came first. It should have been, but my job was always first. I always wanted to be better than anybody else, but my family suffered from that.

Todd Dills: That was the voice of Mr. Ken Greff, reflecting on one regret from what was a 70-year career in and around trucking, much of it, since the late 1960s anyway, spent in truck sales in various parts of Tennessee, yet Ken Greff got his start far away from the US Southeast in Western Canada, driving and owning trucks in a variety of operations detailed in this podcast. I'm Todd Dills. In this Overdrive Radio edition, we're excerpting a new effort by host and McMahon Truck Centers sales rep Corey Price, who lives due east of Nashville near Cookville, Tennessee. Price interviewed Greff for the first episode of podcast he's calling Trucking Legends, an old-school trucking podcast he envisions as a repository for preserving the stories of those who've been in the business going way back. Here's Price setting us up.

Corey Price: I grew up around trucks. Nearly every one of my uncles in my family have drove trucks and got infatuated with trucks when I was around three or four year old, just loved them, loved watching them on TV and being around them. Went to my first truck show when I was 10 years old and I was the kid that when I would go to town, there was a truck stop in the Cookeville, Tennessee, area, and I'd always have my dad stop and I'd get one of the truck papers just to look at the trucks. Loved anything to do with trucks. And what I actually went to was the first annual Music City Chapter ATHS Show, American Truck Historical Society Show. It was in Nashville. Went with a friend of mine that I went to church with, Jake Baker. He had a 1950 Max LJT that we drove down there that day when I was 10 and was just around trucks, loved trucks, and then joined ATHS, the organization, when I was like 17.

Then I got married when I was 22 and then when I was 24, I took over being the chapter president for six years at the local American Truck Historical Society chapter and helped host their shows and we helped with the Alabama chapter to host the 2009 national convention in Huntsville, Alabama. At the time, I was working in a factory. That job ended up going to Mexico in 2011 and I got a job selling international trucks at dealership there in Cookeville and sold International trucks for nine years. And then I was offered an opportunity through the McMahon truck dealer in Nashville, which is the Mack truck dealer. Part of their territory is up here in the Upper Cumberland area where I live. And they were looking to hire someone to be area manager to sell trucks, parts. And there's a mobile service truck in this area. I helped schedule that and helped get him work.

They hired me and I've been working with Mack for a little over three years now. Ken Greff was actually at the first truck show I went to. He was working for, at that time it was Kenworth of Tennessee. He brought a new Kenworth over to the show and I vaguely remember him, being 10 years old at the time myself, but when I got to be chapter president every year we would have a Christmas dinner and we would have an auction where we would auction off truck stuff and raise money for the chapter. And every year he would donate a Kenworth jacket and I would go down there to his office and he would give me a jacket to auction off. And I just got to know him through that way. And then when I actually got a job in truck sales, he was one of the first people I called because I was very green, knew trucks but didn't know nothing about selling. And I called him and I was like, "Listen, I need you to coach me here and help me."

Todd Dills: That he did. Along the way, Corey Price got to know Mr. Ken Greff's past a good bit better. It stretches all the way back to World War II times when as a young boy he got to start trucking via a little bit of a subterfuge on the part of his mother, as you'll hear in what follows. Again, as noted, it's excerpted from the first edition of what Corey Price hopes will eventually be a monthly podcast called again β€œTrucking Legends.” Along the way as we run through Mr. Greff's early days trucking toward how he got from trucking in Western Canada to truck sales in Middle Tennessee, we'll hear more from Price too on his motivation for creating the podcast. Keep tuned for it all after this message from Overdrive Radio's sponsor.

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Todd Dills: You can stock up on Howes Diesel Treat for the winter months via H-O-W-E-S howesproducts.com. Here's Mr. Ken Greff taking us back to the beginning of what would ultimately be a 70 plus year career round trucking in some form or fashion. Here we go.

Ken Greff: Okay. I was born at a very early age in 1935 in Vancouver, BC Canada. My mother at the time was terrified, she's worried about the Japanese invading Canada in World War II. So we moved to a little tiny town in Alberta. The population to this day is about 185. It's a logging community and an oil community. That's where we landed for several years, in fact. I went to school there. I started school when I was five years old, the very small school. There's only about five or six grades in that school, so I skipped a couple of grades. So I graduated from grade 12 when I was like 13, but not because I was smart because there wasn't any room for any more students. And then I went to work for part-time for Beggar's Garage, pumping gas after school every day. And the customers at that time that I pumped gas for, they were all lumber haulers and I was fascinated by their trucks and I would ride with those guys at night.

It was about a 40 or 50 mile trip, little old two lane road. You could only run to the wintertime because it's too muddy in the summertime. I would ride with those guys at night. That's how I got some interested in trucks. In the wintertime we would go down to 30, 40 below zero and some of the trailers they pulled, they hauled lumber about 40 miles and counting mine. Some of the trailers were slave trailers. It was a real narrow road. If a loaded truck met an empty truck, the empty truck would go into the ditch. The loaded truck would stop and back up and pull them out the ditch. But they couldn't hardly run in the summertime because of the rain. And they were dirt roads so they could only run in the wintertime to haul lumber. The trucks that are mostly Fords, 1944, 45 Fords, the hero, the all time big time hero had two internationals, KB seven Internationals, and boy, he was our hero.

And then one day he got a B61 mack and nobody could even imagine the truck that big being on our roads. It was too big a truck. Nick Schmidt was his name. And anyway, that's that story about hauling the lumber. Also, at that same time I got into a little band, a guy named Aaron Brown who was a trucker also. He started the band called the Winfield Amateurs. I played banjo. My brother played drums and Ruthie Brown played the piano. Jackie Brown played clarinet and Robert Dolman played the saxophone. I might mention that at that time we all had a dream. We all wanted to do certain things When we grew up, Jackie wanted to be a doctor. He is a doctor today. Ruthie wanted to marry money. She's married to a doctor. Robert Dolman wanted to be in the construction business today. He owns a construction company. I wanted to fool with trucks and I did, and my brother wanted to play music and that's what he did and that's what until he died.

Corey Price: A lot of these guys that I'm going to be talking to are up in years. They're going to be passing on him. We're going to lose a lot of knowledge that we would pass on. And Ken, of course, Ken's 88 years old and lived alone. He's still very active and healthy, wanting to reach out to him while he's still able to give me information and able to.

Todd Dills: He's a good storyteller for sure. And his history goes way back. I love the story of how he got into trucking, but a little bit of a subterfuge on the part of his mother.

Ken Greff: My dear old mother altered my birth certificate and backed it up. So when I was 12, but really it looked like I was 17, I moved to Category Alberta by myself and took a job at Macklin Motors, the Ford dealership parking cars. I did that for a while and one day I thought, I've got to start driving trucks. I picked up the phone, I didn't know who to call about a job. I called a company called Stewart Petroleums. I didn't know what kind of trucking they did. I just called them and they signed me up to deliver propane with a GMZ straight job and I'd never driven a truck before, just ridden with those guys. So I knew how to shift gears. So that's how I got into the truck. And then later on I went to work for a company called [inaudible 00:11:10] Oil Transport, hauling crude oil from Munson, Alberta into Calgary to the refinery and I was still pretty young then.

And then later on I drove for a couple other little companies in the meantime hauling cattle and gas and I don't know what all but one of the guys back in my hometown, Aaron Brown, who started the Winfield Amateurs, he owned Winfield Transport. He and I bought a truck together, my parts portion of the truck, thanks to a lady called Mrs. Saban who owned Saban's store. To tell you that story, I stole a pipe from her store when I was just a little guy and Jackie Brown stole a can of tobacco from another store. We were out in the woods and boy did we ever smoke. My conscience bothers me and I took the pipe back to Mrs. Saban at Saban store and she remembered that and she loaned me money from my share of that truck.

Nobody in my family thought had any, I was way too young to drive long haul. So that's when we got that 26 White and started hauling me from Burnson company in Edmonton, Alberta to Bo's head in Brooklyn, New York most of the time we ran through the US because better roads and cheaper fuel. We grew up into Montana, then go all the way across.

Corey Price: How much was fuel at that time?

Ken Greff: I don't know. But I remember I used to smoke a lot then I could buy a whole carton of camels for a dollar 90. I haven't smoked in years, in years and years, but it was such a bargain. I had to smoke three, at least three packs a day. Well we had actually had a refrigerator unit up in the nose, it was a Thermo King. It was a 32-foot trailer and weighed a lot. We couldn't care but barely hauled 30,000 pounds legally. We ran through the states then. So that was important.

Todd Dills: So what does come through in this Corey really well is just the thirst I think for some of the detail of some of the old trucks that Ken talks about, being in his early days, and he did talk about that. I think it was like a 52 or 53 White tractor that he pulled a reefer with as a what? And he was part owner at the tender, excuse me, at the very advanced age of 15.

Corey Price: Modern as trucking is today and all the technology that's out there and me being at Max salesman, I'm involved in that every day I see the technology that's coming and where it's leading, but I don't want people to forget the roots where we come from, trucks. It started back way long time ago. It actually even started when they was just using horses and buggies and we've advanced several years over that. But I don't want people to forget the roots where it come from and hear the stories that got us to where we are today.

Todd Dills: I also love that, speaking of technology, that stuff was advancing at a rapid clip back then too. I know Ken talks about that reefer trailer that he had that had one of the early reefer units in it, for instance. But also there's this story of him going down the mountain using one of the first Jake brakes that I believe that PIX company got.

Ken Greff: After we unloaded in Brooklyn, we jumped over into Quebec or Ontario and bring a Canadian load of freight back. But the round trip was about 6,000 miles.

Corey Price: Man, I can't even imagine. But-

Ken Greff: And we ran double, I don't know how we did that, little dinky sleeper, but we didn't know any better. I had a guy running with me and we tried to do a triple week if we could. The company was amalgamated motor trucks and they folded. We folded too. We couldn't afford to keep the truck and the trailer. So then I went to work after that with Pacific Inland Express, PIX in Calgary. They were real good, union, a teamster company and started working for them. It's a funny thing. At that time you had to be 20, I think 25 and I was a lot younger, but first it didn't get showed that I was almost qualified.

So I was running with PIX from Edmonton and Calgary to Winnipeg and I don't know, it's a long time and I wanted to move out west. I was one of what they called a prairie cowboy. And the western drivers, they all drove two sticks. They were very exclusive bunch. They didn't wreck, they drove fast. They drove through the mountains and they were really exclusive bunch of guys. And I was determined that I was going to move out west and I did. And I was the first prairie cowboy to move out west for PIX and I sat there for five weeks at PIX. None of those owner operators wanted to fool with me. I was a prairie cowboy.

One guy named Jim Dalarack, they called him Rat Sack because he had an army blanket for a sleeper curtain and an old Peterbilt and he was stuck for a driver one night and he had to get a hot load of peaches out of the Okanagan Valley. And here I was sitting five weeks, didn't know what to do and he finally signed me up to go with him. He warmed me out because up had to go up to the Okanagan and get a load of peaches to go to Winnipeg and first thing he said, he said, "Well normally we wouldn't even let a cowboy like you ride with us. We drop them off at the bus station." But anyway, this truck had a five and a four, so I got mad. I drove up toward Princeton and I was driving slow. The truck, the auxiliary would stick once in a while, so I had to get out with the rubber hammer, get underneath the truck and knock it out of gear.

It didn't shift that exhilarate on the curb. Anyway, we finally get up there to close the [inaudible 00:17:36] to Okanagan to load and he started picking on me and I thought, I can't handle this. So I just put her on the floor, broke that Peterbilt wide open and that's all he needed. He said, "No, we're doing something." And that drove fast from then on and he put the word in. He was a shop steward for the union. It was probably a dozen and a half owner operators for PIX. And he put the word out that that was pretty good and I stayed busy from then on, I did in off a trip and turn right, run right back on another trip with somebody else.

But that's what it took was just to get angry and put it on the floor.

Corey Price: When you say put it on the floor, how fast was you going in that?

Ken Greff: Probably 60.

Corey Price: Right?

Ken Greff: We had a lot of two lane roads too.

Then up in the Okanagan, and going from Hope to Princeton. If you look at the map, I think it was about 30, 35 miles from Hope to Princeton. It'd take an hour, 45 minutes from Hope to Princeton just crawling up the hill and you get to the top of the mountain and you'd stop and let the engine cool off while the engine was cooling off. You'd crawl under the trigger to make sure your brakes are okay.

You didn't have jig brakes and then go down the other side and go on. Well we got a jig, I was one of the first people to get a jig brake on that Freight liner in fact, and I know I was one of the first guys to get one. I was going down down into the Okanagan, not the Okanagan, but down into over the other side of Sawyers, I guess going down the mountain. And one of my buddies met me and I was going down the hill and he heard that jig break. He thought I'd lost control of the truck. He'd never heard of a jig break. That's why I was going so fast.

Todd Dills: New technology. Right.

Corey Price: And Ken, interesting story about Ken. He was back there in the forties driving these trucks and like you said, was driving one of the first jig brakes, first reefers, and he sold trucks up till mid, I'm going to say maybe 2008 or 10. And then he actually even worked for a company moving trucks in between dealerships for up to about three or four years ago. So he's seen technology change tremendously.

Todd Dills: In a big way and he's seen a lot of different, seen it from a lot of different perspectives too. Shop side, dealer side, I'm sure, of course rather. And from the driver's seat

Ken Greff: With PIX, we hauled about everything. We hauled a lot of liquor out of Seagram's in Montreal and we hauled a lot of soap out of Toronto. Leather, drugs. Most of it was high dollar freight. It wasn't our truck. One time later on I bought half interest in two trucks. But at that time when we first started, it was what we did. And then PIX, they merged with a company called Gill Interstate Lines. Then they called it Gill PIX. And I drove for Gill PIX too for a long time and eventually got my own trucks and lived happily ever after. I bought a new Freight liner of the pictures in there and I hauled a bulk cement into some of these communities all over British Columbia.

And I was the first person to pull a load of cement from into [inaudible 00:21:07] that was an Indian reservation. So about 200 miles in, it was a dirt road and it was just like this going up and down. The road was so narrow that if you met a car, if you're coming out empty and you met a car going up the hill, you just drop over the mountain, just slide down to the bottom of an empty trailer. It took 18 hours to make that round trip. It was so rough and severity. That's what we did. Then I ran up into the north country, close to the Yukon. Didn't get into the Yukon, but I hauled bulk cement over all over British Columbia by myself with that truck.

Corey Price: Now it was a cab over Freightliner. What year was it?

Ken Greff: Oh gosh, I don't know. Had a five and a four and it was Cummins engine. It was so dusty we had to change the air cleaner every trip. It was so dusty.

Todd Dills: That stint as an owner operator running bulk cement in British Columbia would last Ken Greff a couple of years before he made the decision in part to follow his brother to Nashville. As mentioned briefly earlier, Ken Greff's brother took to music and went on to do big things as a songwriter. Here's Ken talking about the band he was in as a young man playing the banjo. He mentioned early on, well

Ken Greff: It wasn't really country, just old-timey stuff.

Ken Greff: We played the same five songs all the time. It's all we knew.

Corey Price: So can you still play banjo today?

Ken Greff: No, I can't. I've got my banjo in there. They're really the same banjo and it's probably worth a lot, I'll show to you, it's worth a lot of money, but because of my arthritis, I can't play it anymore and my hearing's messed up. So even when I played the piano, it doesn't sound right, but it is right. I got about 30 songs, 40 songs on the piano. I played a little while ago waiting on you. Yeah, I'm told my dad's family, they played in the opera, not the opera. The opera in Amsterdam. And that rubbed off on my brother and because my brother, he wrote over 2000 songs and he's got 600 recorded.

Corey Price: Now your brother was, you said five years younger than you.

Ken Greff: My brother, yeah.

Corey Price: And his name's Ray Griff.

Ken Greff: His name was spelled different. Jim Raves got him a contract with RCA and RCA changed his name to G-R-I-F-F and he eventually made that his legal name so you can pull up his website. He's got all kinds of hits songs over the years. He wrote songs for everybody from Wayne Newton to Hank Snow, I mean, you name it. The most famous song was Baby. That's the song that brought me down here. It went worldwide and that's what got him from then on a songwriter in Nashville. If he writes a hit, it's a big hit. The entertainers then will come to him for music, for songs and the producers and stuff.

And from then on, he just, everybody in the world recorded his songs. One year, I think I told you this. One year, he was Nashville's number one songwriter many years ago. But you pick up, I've got dozens and dozens of albums in there by other artists. It's unbelievable the songs, pop and country. I didn't last long at my brother's company. Well, I was supposed to have been a partner, but that's another story. But I did get into a booking agency later on for a while, including Confederate Railroad and some of it helped me get inside to a lot of these recording sessions and stuff.

Todd Dills:vWhen he first moved to Nashville though. …

Ken Greff: I’m down here, and my family was still in Vancouver waiting for me to get settled and I didn't fit in to my brother's music company. There was three of us that owned that company. I was one of the three. The second person he bought, my brother bought her out for a hundred thousand After one year I didn't get anything, so that didn't matter. But anyway, so I had to start all over again. My family then they were sitting there, they had to stay with my mother in Calgary for a while until I found the place to live in Nashville.

And then I started driving for Time Freight. And I'll tell you a quick story about that. I'll give Teamsters credit. When I starved out with the music business, I applied for a job with Colonial or some other truck line that they said, "Well, you're a good driver." They tested me in about two blocks, said, "We going to pay you so-and-so." About half what I deserved. I said, "I can't do that." So I called the teamsters, told them my situation. They called the Teamsters in Vancouver. I went out that night without a driving test for Time Freight, no questions. It was time. And then went from Time to Time DC.

They folded up and I would just run to, we ran Bristol, we ran Chattanooga, Memphis, Bristol was my favorite one because you could go and spend the night up there, get up there like early in the morning and I'd sit around two or three other drivers and play the piano. We'd sing for a while and go to bed until they called us that night, come back to Nashville.

Corey Price: So this was mid to late sixties, right when this has taken place?

Ken Greff: When they came out with the turbos, I wrote a letter. He didn't know what turbos were and the drivers were tearing up the engines and I knew why they were doing it. So I wrote an article and put it on the bulletin board how they should drive turbocharged engines. Time offered me a job at the terminal in Texas in the shop.

I didn't tell you that to me. We had turbos for years.

Corey Price: Yeah, seems like in talking to you, you ran a lot of trucks with Cummins engines. I guess that was the-

Ken Greff: That was the thing, nothing else would hold up. They had [inaudible 00:27:12] for a while. Bhutan, they tried the jet engines. They got them from Boeing in Seattle, which is just across the line, but they were too hot. The exhaust was so hot, it was burning up the trees and then they got in the Bhutan engines.

The Bhutans couldn't stand the heat. Detroit's, they wouldn't last at all. They brought a cracker box into Vancouver. Nobody would even drive them because they're too cold for one thing, that little cracker box cab. But Cummins was the main engine at that time. I was driving home, going home from work one day, I passed by Kenworth of Tennessee and I stopped by there and asked Lester Turner if they needed anybody to bring trucks in from Seattle. He said, "No, we've got people to do that." And just as an afterthought, I said, "I bet you I could sell Kenworth because I've owned them and I believe in them. If you don't believe in something, it'll never work."

"I believe in them and I know I could sell them." And he said, you think you can? I said, yeah. So about a month later, Mr. Turner calls me. He said, "Do you still think you can sell a truck?" I said, "Yeah, I know I can sell Kenworth because I've owned and driven them." And he said, "Well, would you move to Knoxville?" I said, "Sure," "You want to work on the straight commission?" I said, "I sure would." So I was the first salesman. Ken was salesman in Knoxville, and I sleep in my car one night, in the cheap motel the next night, and I parked a truck or two at Kmart parking lot and had a lot of great people in Knoxville that stood up for me. And I can give credit to probably, I've got names of a dozen people that coached me over the years and Knoxville treated me royally. They got me into the Knoxville Motor Truck Association. I got right in with the transportation people,

And I sold quite a few Kenworths around Knoxville. And Kenworth had promised me an office and they wouldn't do it. In the meantime, Paul Cannon, who was the manager of Knoxville Mac, he didn't like any competition. He either run them out or hired them. He hired me as a sales manager and I didn't have a clue about Mac trucks, because where I come from, they wouldn't use Macs. There was a few B models around but that was about it. They didn't have a big enough engine in them except for one thing. And its sleepers were too small. Anyway, a funny story about Kenworth. Nobody in east Tennessee had ever heard of a Kenworth, and there was a company called Burnett Produce up in Morristown, and I had this big shiny Kenworth up there, Pat Burnett, all their trucks were, the Chrome package was door handles and headlight range. That's it. And here I'm with this really fancy Kenworth. I took it up there to show Pat Burnett and he walked out to the truck and he just walked around it twice and grunted a few times.

Then his son Tubby, he came out and looked at it and I said, "Wat do you think about a Kenworth?" "Nah, it ain't no good." "You ever drive a Kenworth?" "Nah, it ain't no good." "Do you know anybody that owns one?" "Nah, it ain't no good." So I couldn't hardly handle that. I wasn't used to that resistance. So I followed him back in the office. I'm looking out the window like my only friend, my Kenworth truck and here the old lady, she was a bookkeeper too. She was out there looking at that truck. She's standing there with her arms folded. She finally opened the door and peeked inside. She stood there and she studied that name. She came back in the office and I said, "What do you think?" She said, "I'll bet them sheriffs and robot trucks are good." Said, "I had a Kenworth washer never did wear out." I never did sell my Kenworth but when I became sales manager at Knoxville Mac, I did sell them some Macs.

Corey Price: We have guys that have stories of being a truck driver for a long time. We've got guys that have owned trucks, have stories, and we got guys that maybe sold trucks. But he's got a perspective of all of them.

Todd Dills: In some ways, that goes for Mr. Corey Price too. Host of the new Trucking Legends podcast. Find a link to where you can hear Price's full talk with Ken Greff and the post that will house this podcast when it goes live at the world-famous overdriveonline.com. Monday, October 23. Note too, that Price is a truck owner himself, the beautiful single drive Axle Mac with interesting story behind it.

Corey Price: 1986 Cabover Mack MH 6-13 that I am. I got it in 2008 and I took it several truck shows, but it's not restored or nothing, but enjoy showing it and being around, just driving it and all that. So I had it non-commercial and was driving it before I got my CDLs, but soon as I started selling trucks, I got my Class A CDLs. So lots of times I'll jump in a truck, drive it out to a customer, show it to them, and I used to sell trailers. So I'd hook to a trailer, go show a trailer. It's got a Mac E-6 300 that's been turned to 350 and a nine speed transmission, double over, top gears in the dash, two-tone blue. And I actually got it when I was chapter president in the ATHS. I hadn't been married long and we just had our son, have two children, a son and a daughter.

They're both in high school now. And we was in the process of wanting to build a house and everybody kept saying, "When are you going to get an old truck?" And I was like, "I just can't afford it right now guys. I'm trying to build a house, raising a family, working." And so in 2008, a bunch of the guys in the Music City chapter went together. One of the guys had the truck. It wasn't using it no more, it was just sitting around. They cleaned it up, made sure it was cleaned up and running, put some aluminum wheels on it, and they actually presented it to me, gave it to me at a show over in Knoxville. That's how I got my Mac cab over.

Todd Dills: It's Corey Price with the McMahon Truck Center in Nashville, Tennessee who notes they've got some sleepers on the ground there at the location for anyone in the market today. There's all types of truck sales folks out there, but if you want to talk old trucks or just pick his brain over what's available, he says, give him a call. That's for the Trucking Legends podcast too. He offered this call to Overdrive Radio listeners.

Corey Price: I've got several people lined up, but maybe there's somebody out there that knows a trucking legend that would be good for my podcast that I don't know about. I'd love to, if they could reach out to me and let me know.

Todd Dills: Find his email contact for that in the show notes. Wherever you're listening, Overdrive Radio is on Spotify, SoundCloud, apple and Google Podcast. Tune in on most any platform. Subscribe so you don't miss an episode and if you're enjoying these, leave us a rating and review there. Big thanks in advance for that. And here's thanks again to Mr. Corey Price and Ken Greff for their time and their stories.