Idaho-based Gary Mackay grew up on a farm and was always attracted to trucks. His family had farm trucks but no semis back then.
When he got old enough, Mackay turned to flatbed work over-the-road in the wintertime when farming slowed down, leading to a career at UPS, the last six years there spent driving the company’s tractor-trailers, or feeder trucks, from point to point.
He retired in 2016 and turned his full attention to his own farm operation, One Circle Farm, putting trucks into service to haul his own product, including the extended-hood 1998 Peterbilt 379 featured here. It's certainly captured the attention of Overdrive readers, recently crowned the 2025 Pride & Polish champ in the Antique category.
Being selected by fellow owner-operators and drivers during the voting period “means a lot," Mackay said. “I just do it because I like it ..., but it does make you feel good that your peers like what you do.”
[Related: Pride & Polish: Meet the 2025 champs]
Mackay launched the farm way back in 1980 when he got married. The "One Circle" name came after the Mackays put in a single pivot irrigation system, which irrigates in a large circular area. The name was “kind of a joke when we started it, but it’s always been kind of fun.”
It's been strong for more than 45 years now harvesting alfalfa, barley and some wheat. Unlike many farmers in Idaho, the Mackays never got into farming potatoes. “Our soil wasn’t quite what you would have for potatoes, so that’s OK,” he said. “We did fine with the alfalfa.”
It's “just evolved and gotten a little bigger and a little bigger as we went all these years,” he added.
Mackay said he and his wife are starting to slow down some on that side of things as they get older, “and a few logistic changes need to be made,” he said. But he plans to keep working on the trucking side of the business.
With the decision a decade ago to retire from UPS runs, “I could gain better customers” for the farming operation by hauling his own commodities “because it’s kind of an on-demand thing," Mackay said. "Oh, you wanted hay? Sure, no problem.” Trucking was a "good add to our operation," more than just the simple fact that Mackay loves them.
He started with a Kenworth daycab, with no plans to go OTR, but as the farm “got better contacts,” he said he'd “haul hay up into Montana, and I would pick up lumber to come back, and it was usually an overnight thing.”
That lumber backhaul has been a great connection for the business, and he got it by chance hauling through the town where the broker was located. The broker “saw my truck going through, and they called me and that’s how that relationship got started,” he said.
Mackay then decided he needed a second truck, which turned out to be the ’98 Pete.
The 379 really needed a new paint job, which he started on almost immediately after a haul into Montana saw Mackay "bump an elk," as he put it. "Just a little on one fender, and so that’s where the paint job came in is when we had to fix the fender.”
He repainted the whole unit from a silver/gray to its current blue-and-white scheme.
It marked the beginning of the custom build of the unit roughly five years ago. The prior owner was getting rid of some older trucks due to his home state of California’s stricter emissions standards, and a couple different trucks had Caterpillar power, just what Mackay sought.
“I sent him a down payment” after asking the owner to hold onto a red truck Mackay had seen only online, until he could get out to the site to look at it. “I get there, and, you know, I told him to pick me up at the airport and let’s go look at that red truck, and then there’s silence” on the other end of the line. “He says, ‘How about a gray one?’ He mixed up and sold the red one.”
Yet the gray 379 had "the Bed and Breakfast sleeper” straight from the factory, he noted. The truck he initially agreed to buy had been a daycab, with a sleeper added later in its life. Ultimately, this gray truck was a better option.
"A good price," Mackay said, who brought it home and got to trucking.
Apart from the paint, he’s continued to fix it up “just because it’s fun,” he said. It's well-used with 2.5 million miles behind it. “It needed freshening up on the interior and exterior, and you just do a little bit along the way and just enjoy it and go from there,” he said.
Among upgrades made since purchase, Mackay's replaced the suspension with a low leaf air ride suspension, replaced axles and added disc brakes -- “that’s really a nice improvement,” he noted.
The truck is powered by a 550-hp 2WS Cat 3406E with an 18-speed transmission, both of which Mackay's replaced since purchase.
Inside the unit, the owner-operator put in a Truck’N Awesome interior kit, and he took the panels out of the interior to a local upholstery shop and had them recovered to match the sleeper to the cab. He added watermelon lights throughout, along with an upgraded stereo.
That interior also earned Mackay's 379 a second-place finish in the Interior category in Overdrive's 2025 Pride & Polish.
[Related: 'Heavy Hook' 2024 389's tall order: Promoting tow-company positivity to trucking]
Find plenty more about Overdrive's 2025 Pride & Polish finalists via the video presentation of the category placements and winners:
