At the Mid-America Trucking Show on Friday, March 28, 2025, Overdrive hosted 2024 Trucker of the Year Alan Kitzhaber, where he joined legendary trucking radio host Steve Sommers' live broadcast of Overnight Drive from the show floor, along with Overdrive Editor Todd Dills. During the broadcast, livestreamed to Sommers' social networks and broadcast over the air, Dills presented the Trucker of the Year with the contest "trophy," a 1/42nd scale model replica of his 4.1 million mile 1995 Kenworth T600, built by Pennsylvania-based Eston Hoffman of Hoffman Mechanical Design.
Kitzhaber, among just a couple ever members of Cat's 4,000,000-mile club, piloted the 1995 T600 and its 3406e through its entire life, first as a Millis Transfer company driver, buying the truck from the company in 1998.
Likewise, representatives from Trucker of the Year sponsors Bostom Seating and Commercial Vehicle Group awarded Kitzhaber a free Bostrom seat live on-air, among other perks for the winner.
Nominate your own or another owner-operator business for the 2025 Trucker of the Year award, sponsored again for the year by Bostrom, via this link.
Along the way, Sommers' talk with Kitzhaber revealed no small amount of the accumulated widom of the latter's decades of trucking experience -- part of Overdrive's motivation for its Trucker of the Year competition and the related Partners in Business playbook for owner-operator careers, said Dills: "A lot of my motivation in honoring some of the best in the business [through the Trucker of the Year program] is the opportunity to share ideas for [honing] the craft of trucking as an owner-operator, ... to build a knowledge base for the next generation to learn from."
Kitzhaber, for his part, Tuesday the following week, finished his final load with his authority as Oak Ridge Transport, hanging up the keys after the long run in his Caterpillar-powered 1995 Kenworth T600. The odometer read, he said, 4,106,766 miles.
With the Trucker of the Year nod, Kitzhaber goes out at the top, with more than three decades in the rear view, to enjoy retirement in style in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.
Read more about Kitzhaber and all of the 2024 and 2025 Trucker of the Year contenders via this link.
[Related: Staying young, learning more every day: Overdrive Trucker of the Year Alan Kitzhaber]
Insights gleaned from the accumulated knowledge of all of our Truckers of the Month year-in, year-out contribute in a big way to the Overdrive/ATBS coproduction of the newly revamped but long-running Partners in Business manual, a comprehensive playbook for owner-operator businesses. Access the playbook via this link.
