Herbie Walker is a professional trucker in the very truest sense of those words. He owns his own truck and flatdeck trailer, and he’s been a true independent for almost four decades. In fact, the 58-year-old Walker, who lives in Binbrook, Ont., has never gone trucking for anyone but himself. He services the heck out of a few dedicated customers, two of them since 1965. He takes care of his trusty ’85 Western Star, his fourth truck, but only the second since 1968. And he’s worked hard since he was 12, when he started busting tires, changing oil, doing bodywork, and occasionally climbing aboard and going for a ride.

Trucking wasn’t what Walker’s father fancied for him. He wanted Herbie to take over the family hardware store. But there was something else in the young Walker’s eye-an old Diamond T given to him, at the age of 19, by his friend and mentor, Joe Mordeca. Mordeca was a neighbour, had no kids, and liked to work on his equipment in the driveway. Walker got under the truck and learned as much as he could about the hardware and the business.

“I wasn’t learning anything about trucks in school, so I didn’t see much point in continuing,” Walker says. “I quit after grade 10, got married at 17, and figured I was well on my way.” When he traded in his Diamond T on a 1954 Kenworth cabover, the die was cast.

The mid-1960s was the time to be trucking. If you had an operating authority of your own, you couldn’t help but make money. If you didn’t have the licence to print the stuff, you could still do well as a gypsy. Had Walker chosen to follow the footsteps of his friends and cohorts running around Ontario’s Golden Horseshoe-guys like Earl Paddock, Lacey Dalton, and the crowd, all big players in the local trucking community-he too might have a fleet named after him. But Walker was content to take the road less travelled.

Essentially, he’s been hauling the same loads for the same customers since 1965-softwood lumber to Pennsylvania and nearby states, with hardwood coming back-and he’s never even thought of doing it any differently.

Herbie Walker started hauling for a lumber company in Burlington, Ont., just west of Toronto, under a fellow named H.S. Bartram, who later went on to open his own lumber business. “When they started hauling the lumber out of Quebec into southern Ontario on trains,” Walker recalls, “guys in this area were well positioned to take advantage of the new source of loads going south.”

When Bartram set up down the road in Stoney Creek, Walker was there, and the relationship has weathered the years. “I’ve seen lots of others come along and make all kinds of promises,” Walker says. “But I’m still the first guy they call.”

That’s not arrogance, just a quiet confidence. “My dad always told me I wasn’t any better or any worse than anybody else,” Walker says with a smile. “Dad said I had to earn people’s respect. And he was right. I’ve earned my customers’ respect, and they’ve earned mine.”

While some might be inclined to view Walker’s lack of growth as a failure to exploit an opportunity, he sees it differently. “I’ve always been a ‘glass-half-full’ type,” he says. Growth would have taken him out of the driver’s seat.

Expansion requires hands-on management. And he admits quite frankly that management isn’t one of his strongest suits.

“I’ve got a nice home, a few toys, some money in the stock market. What more could I want?” he asks. “I could have built a fleet but I never saw myself in an office. To run a fleet you have to manage it, and that means a desk job.”

Right now, Walker has the freedom to come and go when he pleases, but also the discipline to realize that he’s still got to maintain the customer’s confidence.

“True freedom, to me, is not having to answer to a bank manager,” he says with a sly smile. “Some guys I started with in this business are now millionaires, but I didn’t want to do what they had to do to get where they are today.” Walker played the game his way, by earning the trust of just a few customers, and played that card very much to his own advantage.

Walker bought his Western Star from Lawrence Marshall in 1985, when the Stoney Creek dealership-Larry’s Western Star-first opened. To him, the truck is a tool and little more. He fixes what needs fixing, replaces what needs replacing, and doesn’t pay that much attention to the nickels and dimes.

“I’d drive myself crazy costing out everything I’ve put into the truck over the years,” he said. “It gets what it needs. I guess I’m inclined to look at the bigger picture.”

Walker offers tires as an example. “There’s no way I can buy a tire for what the big fleets pay, so I need to get more value out of it over the long run. If I can run it out 25% further, I effectively reduce the price of the tire by 25%,” he says triumphantly. “That’s how I compete.”

His previous truck, a 1968 KW conventional, lasted 17 years and 1.7 million miles, so if he’s running true to form, Walker will be looking for something soon. The truck is beginning to look its age and it’s starting to get him noticed more frequently by the roadside inspectors. More often than not, they turn him loose with a smile.

“They got me a few months back with a broken spring,” he laments. “I probably could have beaten it, but why raise their hackles? You get them going and they can make life a lot worse for you.”

This gets Walker going a little. “I guess we [truckers and the enforcers] just have different agendas. I’ve got no problem with running a safe truck, and mine is, but I don’t understand the value of making me pay $800 for the service call and the spring, when it clearly presented no danger to me or the public,” argues Walker. “When it’s a threat, repair it. It’s just too bad when honest, hardworking guys get caught in a net intended for the nasty folks. It’s funny, because those guys never go near the scales anyway.”

Walker admits he’s been thinking about a new truck, because Walker figures a truck should earn its keep. “The best I can get out of my 400 Cummins Big Cam III is about 6.1 mpg,” he says. “But I hear guys talking about 8 and 9 mpg with new engines. That would be nice. But the new truck would mean I’d have to get out and work to pay for it.” That’s a mistake too many owner-operators make, he says. “They buy the truck they want, then have to find a job that’ll support it.”

Herbie Walker is different. There’s little glamour in driving around in a 16-year old truck. Running lumber isn’t the easiest job in the world, and intentionally staying small isn’t something many people have the discipline to do.

Yet Walker is happy with the world he and his wife, Shirley, managed to build. The pair successfully raised their family on a single income. They built a delightful home in Binbrook, and the two of them take at least six weeks of vacation every year.

“I married Shirley, he grins. “Not the truck.”