Poignant moments are not common in our industry. Or more likely, given the preponderance of trying-hard-to-be-macho men in this business, such moments are simply never acknowledged.

Most women would tell you that those of us flying the guy flag are simply too insensitive to notice in the first place. They may well be right.

But even allowing for my constricted male sensitivities, I have nonetheless experienced many poignant moments in trucking, some that drew tears to my eyes, some that involved tears in other male eyes. Some that simply made me pause and reflect, like my one and only meeting with Bruce R. Smith a decade ago.

My first realization that folks of the trucking persuasion could be an emotional bunch came back in the late 1970s. With my first trucking magazine, Canadian Driver/Owner, I inherited a terrific storyteller and a character called Barney Gears. A driver, he was the creation of B.C. writer and ex-trucker Rud Kendall.

As schmaltzy as could be, the Barney Gears column struck a real chord in readers, none more so than an episode in which Barney told us of a driver who had gone agricultural, as they say in car-racing circles. He’d rolled his truck and was trapped in the cab in a ditch, but miraculously had pen and paper close at hand to write a last letter to his wife before he died. Like I said, schmaltzy.

Anyway, the ‘letter’ — as found by an RCMP officer and related to Barney — was recreated in the column. I admit that it tugged at my own heart strings a little, but it just about yanked the heart right out of a grizzled, ostensibly hard-nosed, veteran driver I met not long afterwards at a dealership opening.

Maybe 60 years old, rather slight but looking ornery, he came up to me and said he’d read Rud’s piece and loved it. While he spoke, the tears started rolling down his cheeks in full view of 60 or 70 other guys. I was amazed, but I’d learned something important.

More recently, and altogether too real, I attended the funeral of one of the best people this industry — or any other — has ever produced, Canpar’s John Cyopeck. As Rick Gaetz read his heartfelt eulogy, there weren’t many dry eyes in the entire packed-to-the-gunwales church. Big men, rich men, strong men of trucking, all of them choked up.

For me, perhaps even more moving was the dinner held several months earlier to cap John’s incredible fund-raising drive that collected some $2.5 million for a Mississauga hospital. With much the same crowd that attended his funeral, it was an evening of astonishing generosity, all in aid of John’s wish to provide for others.

The outpouring of affection for him was tangible that night, and John’s pride in achieving his goal even more so. Everyone knew he was dying, and despite all the good cheer, that cold fact hung over every word, every glance. As with the man, it’s an evening I won’t forget.

In a far more subtle way, and without the drama of tears, I had another powerfully poignant moment in the yard at Bruce R. Smith Limited just outside Simcoe, Ont. some 10 years earlier. I was spending the day there in the course of writing a story about this pillar of trucking in southwestern Ontario, and at one point found myself talking to a mechanic doing a wheel repair of some sort on a flatdeck.

While we chatted a pickup truck drove into the yard and an elderly man stepped out and walked over to us. Frankly, given his dress –overalls, if I remember correctly — I assumed he was delivering parts. It soon clicked that this was Bruce R. himself. I only knew his son John, who’d been running the company for many years, and hadn’t expected to meet the founder, so this was a bonus.

Naturally, we chatted, and I haven’t forgotten the profound sadness in his voice when he quietly said that he didn’t understand his company anymore. The way it was run, the computerized dispatch, the satellite communications, the electronic billing, all of that modern stuff.

He told me about the early days in 1947 and later when he and his wife ran the company from their kitchen table in the house just behind us, a house that had by then been completely taken over by company offices. He said he only understood the shop nowadays.

He was a man who once had a very firm grip on the wheel of his fleet, who grew it from nothing to something substantial, and then had to watch it sail by him.

Bruce died at the end of March, 82 years old by then, a true pioneer of trucking. And like many others of his vintage, he launched something on a strong foundation of hard work, loyalty, and a real sense of duty to his customers.

In an era of digital this and digital that, we would do well to remember what Bruce represented. The principles haven’t changed.