Trucker Buddy Talk : Fall 2009
Sounds of Success
H oward Salmon, 49, is among rare company: He's one of very few continental U.S. truckers to call Hawaii home. I live in Haleiwa, he says. It's on Oahu I have to work over here for most of the year, park my truck in wintertime and spend the winter out there. The way I look at it is you only live one time. The drive to make the most of his time helps his business, too, where he nets $75,000 to $80,000 yearly hauling specialty foods, produce and other refrigerated freight in a long-paid-for and somewhat modified 1999 Kenworth W900L and Great Dane spread-axle reefer. That drive also feeds a growing passion for music. This year, Salmon released his first coun-try music record and shipped 600 copies to U.S. troops with the Owner-Operator Inde-pendent Drivers Association's Truckers for Troops program. The roots of his trucking and musical interests run to his own military service. His first driving job was in the late 1970s as a tow-truck opera-tor while stationed with the U.S. Army in Kansas, Korea and Oklahoma. He followed his army term as a driver stationed at Travis Air Force Base closer to his childhood home near Sacramento, Calif. I drove anything they had, he says. His mother first inspired the interest in music that blossomed while he was stationed at Travis. There, he sang in the church with my friends and started to play the guitar, he says. His first trucking job was as a company driver for Morris Claiborn's small fleet hauling brokered freight for Silva Bros. Or-chards and Trucking of Se-bastopol, Calif. Starting out in a 1976 Peterbilt cabover, I had to open both win-dows and kick the door vent open just to try to stay cool, he says. He was one of the tops, says Bill Silva, who jumped at the chance to hire Salmon when Clai-born moved to North Carolina. He never argued I never give up, he says. I will find a way to make my business work. www.truckerbuddy.org 23