I got a news tip a few weeks back about a 77-year-old Greene County woman who owns a truck, one she’s driven all around the country more than 20 years and put a whole lot of miles on.
“She says this truck has more than 3 million miles on it,” my source said, “and that she can prove it.” I had tracked him down on the final 18th hole of a golf course on a warm evening.
“Hang on a minute,” he said. “I’ve got her number here on a piece of paper in my wallet, so I’d have it handy when you called.”
I appreciate readers suggesting stories I’d never find on my own. And this one is the kind I’ve spent decades tracking down.
Last Thursday I gave Jackie Gardner a call and she told me all about how she got a taste of long-distance truck driving as a child and eventually took to the road.
“My mother died when I was four and a half years old. My dad was an over-the-road trucker, so I went on the road with him until I had to go to school.” Long-distance trucking was a family trade. “My daddy’s dad drove, so did my uncle.”
As an adult, Gardner and her ex-husband drove nearly a decade as a team. They shared the driving, but he always did the backing up because he was good at it and could maneuver a wide truck into a not-much-wider spot for loading and unloading.
After they split, she had to learn that skill and she did it on her own. “I taught myself how to back up properly in the parking lot at the old Walmart in Linton. I spray painted some rolls of paper towels fluorescent orange and set them up like pylons. It was just me, my dog and those paper towels.”
She drove leased trucks on her own for years. Then in 2000, when her employer unexpectedly went under, Gardner bought her first truck. Baby Girl is a white 1996 FLD Freightliner that has a special parking area just east of Gardner’s Bloomfield residence.
The truck cab includes a double-bunk sleeper and a skylight. “It’s not all fancy like some of these you see. She’s a work truck and she does her job well.”
Gardner was in Laredo, Texas, in March 2000 when the company she was driving for went under. She cleaned up the truck she’d been driving for them and left it parked at the business.
“I hadn’t been paid for three weeks and couldn’t get ahold of anyone, so I walked back to the motel with my dog,” Gardner recalled. “It was me, my dog, everything I owned and $7.”
Two fellow truckers stepped up and arranged for Gardner to buy the truck she had returned to the defunct business.
“I charged the motel room bill and they came and picked me up for lunch. They had a contract all written up for $54,000, and it was a good deal. They let me pick the date of the month payments were due. I was pretty scared. I’d never owned anything worth that much. The truck was mine.”
She got the Freightliner licensed and registered March 3, 2000. “The very next day I pulled out with my first load.” She and Baby Girl headed to Detroit with a trailer full of diesel engine blocks.
“We’ve been everywhere, 48 states and Canada, me and my Baby Girl, and I wouldn’t trade her for a new truck,” Gardner said.
“We’ve been through three tornadoes and that last hurricane that came through Florida, where I sat in the parking lot at the Great American Chrome shop parking lot watching everything blow sideways.”
Her current husband keeps the 28-year-old truck, which has indeed traveled more than 3 million miles, fine-tuned. When she has a problem on the road, he diagnoses it over the phone.
Once, he drove 300 miles to replace a power steering pump when Gardner was stopped on the side of the highway between Hendersonville, Kentucky, and Nashville, Tennessee.
Gardner and Baby Girl have been on a hiatus since October when a few health issues set her back. They miss being on the road and are anxious to return, heading toward 4 million miles.
Have a story to tell about a car or truck? Contact My Favorite Ride reporter Laura Lane at [email protected] or 812-318-5967.
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