My idea of heaven is to come off the road for a few days, wake up around five in morning and spend about six hours in a coffee-stained recliner gulping endless cups of 30 weight while pecking out stories on an Apple iPad. It’s just me, a pot of coffee and two index fingers at a time. When I like a paragraph enough to read it to my wife, Denise, I know it’s done.
It’s been seven years this Spring since I began as an official contributor for Overdrive. Thanks to every reader who has read and commented; and thanks to Todd Dills and our Editor in Chief Emeritus Max Heine for all the doors they’ve opened for this old gearjammer. Stories like the one below help me remember just how lucky I really am.
There are some dads who, in not giving their children everything they’d like materially, wind up giving them something of far greater value. The story that follows, and what you'll hear in the accompanying edition of Overdrive Radio this week, is about just such a dad, his son, and the living legacy they built together.
It's about the business of Tricia and Tim Eacret, of EZ Pete Interiors.
Tricia and Tim Eacret
The one job that changed it all
Turns out the Eacrets, proprietors of EZ Pete Interiors of Orange City, Iowa, are more like cult celebrities -- at least in the truck show world. I had a chance to sit down with Tricia and Tim beginning at the Mid-America Trucking Show back in March to hear their story.
“We’ve worked with about everybody in the business," as Tim put it, creating custom interiors for trucks in collaboration with anyone from Bryan Martin from 4 State Trucks to SPB Trucking's Gary Jones.
In the beginning, they upholstered everything from boats to planes to classic cars. Then there was that one job that changed it all. “Dad started back in 1956 doing automotive upholstery when he was 16 years old in high school, and continued it my whole life," Tim said. "I was four years old on a button machine, so I kind of grew up in a custom upholstery, custom van shop."
Through the years, they'd done interiors for a few big trucks, too.
Then “we did a truck for T.J. Kounkel out of Northwest Iowa that he ended up taking down to Dallas" to make a splash at the Great American Trucking Show that year, Tim said. Kounkel took home a Best of Show in the Limited Mileage category, among "a bunch of the trophies, ... and it seemed like after that everybody was calling. T.J. was telling everyone where it was done. The phone started ringing."
The Kounkel build at GATS in 2019, where the project 2018 Peterbilt 389's big category Best of Show win led to EZ Pete’s full-time devotion to trucks. Read more about the unit in the story from the time at this link.
About a year on, Tim made the decision to transition from "doing planes and boats and cars and show cars to pretty much just trucks," he said. "My dad thought I was crazy when I told him, ‘We’re done doing everything else. All we’re going to do is trucks.’"
What did his father think? "You’re going to make us go broke!" he said. Tim knew, though, "there's a great market out there" for their expert work.
What stands out to me in Tim Eacret’s account is his father's eventual deference to his son’s business instinct. He could have pulled rank, at least theoretically, but didn’t. The fruits of that partnership continue to this day.
“We’re actually just finishing another job for T.J. now,” Tricia said. “I started helping Tim doing things online in my spare time in 2019. I still had my own full-time job; I was working for an Apple vendor. I kept my job until 2021, then came over with him full-time. He taught me how to do all the actual upholstery, but I’m not as good as he is, and I’m not as fast as he is. I do all of the office stuff, the online, answer all the calls. He manages the shop. I basically sell it, then hand it off to him.“
Tricia sees a prime strength for Tim in is creativity. "It’s one of the things I love about him," she said. "He’s able to see things before they’re created. I have more of a math brain. I’m a numbers kind of a girl. He’s more artsy.
"I can put in an idea, and he comes up with something great. He’s able to take someone’s dream and build it, and it amazes me every day. “
Failing the 'morality test'
Tim Eacret’s ties to trucking run deep. So deep that back in the 2000s, he decided to try his hand as a driver. While EZ Pete's allowed Eacret to work with some of the most successful players in the industry, and he's got unles who were drivers and a grandfather who worked for Wilson Trailers in Sioux City starting in the 1950s, he saw trucking’s bottom of the barrel first hand.
Trucking's “kind of in my blood," as he put it. "I grew up in farm country where if it’s got a motor, we can drive it.”
When he got a little burned out on upholstery in 2007, "I’m going to go see the country," he told himself. "I did some research and about the easiest way to do it was to get hired by one of these mega freight companies. So I did. They told me, 'Come on out! You’re hired. You’re going to be a company driver.’ So I packed up everything and went out West to their office and went to their school. And I was there for about six days, I think it was, and had already gotten my permit. I had enough money saved up [to where] I was able to do it on my own. Didn’t have to be in debt to the company store. But while I was there, I’d seen so many of these guys that I really felt bad for. They’d taken a Greyhound all the way across the country for days to get there, and they were going to end up living on the company dime."
Very early on in the orientation, company reps gave all a seminar of sorts "about leasing a truck," Eacret said. "So we sit down and we all listen, then at the end of the seminar they say, 'Does anyone have any questions?’ And I’ve been a little bit of a smartass myself sometimes (excuse my language). I thought to myself, ‘I gotta say something,’ so I stood up and said, ‘I’m new to this. To me, I’ve never done this. So, this is kind of like buying a restaurant not knowing how to cook.’“
[Related: Tale of two lease-purchases: Truck ownership, and a swift exit]
A short time after the seminar, he noted, he was called in for what all new hires had to do, he said, the so-called "'Morality Interview.' At that time they brought me into the office and the guy in charge at that time says, 'We don’t feel you’re morally, uh ... morally what we’re looking for.’"
And so he wouldn't see the country -- not through a big truck's windshield, in any case -- yet his father's gift to him of upholstery expertise has taken him quite far indeed, as you can hear in the podcast.
Father and son Daniel Laverne Eacret (left) and Tim Eacret. Daniel passed on in 2023.
“It was always a safe place" for him to be, Tim said. "I could always go back and make a good living doing the trim work. Dad never gave me anything, but he showed me how to get what I want."
Case in point, when he was a kid he never got gifted a new bicycle, but his dad would "buy me a pickup box full of used bikes at a garage sale. He’d say, 'If you want a new bike, build one.’ That’s the kind of guy he was. He didn’t think he would make it to his birthday. His birthday was the 22nd of October. He made it to the 26th.”
Browse the Custom Rigs section of Overdrive for more custom interiors, including several examples of the Eacrets' work through the years. And for videos and custom-equipment features delivered to your email inbox, subscribe to Overdrive's weekly Custom Rigs newsletter via this link.
