[Editor’s Note: Our regular I Was There feature in Hemmings Classic Car invites those who worked for the carmakers or adjacent industries to tell their stories. Scott Huntington, who hauled new cars and trucks for Maris Transport, shared his story along with far more photos than we had room to publish in the pages of the magazine, all of which we’re posting here. If you would like to share your experiences—good or bad—for I Was There, email us at editorial@hemmings.com.]
I retired during 2021 after working 33 years in the trucking industry. My first trucking job was driving car carriers for Maris Transport; a long-since defunct company that was based in Oakville, Ontario. It was only a stone’s throw from Ford of Canada’s Oakville Assembly Plant and Ontario Truck Plant.
It began when I earned my Class-A license at the age of 25 on April 20, 1988, after which I started working for Maris on June 20. At the time, there were 177 drivers working for the company, and even though two others began work on the same day, I was number 177 on the seniority list during my first month or so. The job required six weeks of training that paid $8.00 an hour. After successfully completing the training, we would be admitted into the union: Teamsters Local 938.
The first two weeks of training occurred in the Oakville storage yard, where we learned how to load and unload various types of car-hauling equipment, beginning with combos, on which the entire load, except for one car above the cab, was on the trailer. Another was stingers, on which there were three or four cars on the tractor section, depending on the design of the equipment, and the rest of the load was on the trailer, which was attached to the tractor at a point behind the drive axles only inches above the ground. During weeks three and four, we worked at the releasing yard at Ford, helping other drivers load their trucks, and for weeks five and six, we went out on the road with other drivers to learn the rest of the job.
Once training was finished, we were on the road solo. Maris dispatchers would start calling the senior drivers at about midnight to offer loads, and they would get to the bottom of the list between five and six in the morning. Sometimes we were offered non-driving work, such as manning the fuel pumps at the terminal, or working as a yard man at one of the nearby assembly plants. This was hourly work that paid $15.61 an hour that was raised to $16.61 after a brief strike in the late winter of 1989.
When driving, we were paid $2.50 per car for dock loading, which was done at a releasing yard where there were yard personnel to bring the cars to our trucks, in the order we wanted, backed or driven in as specified. The pay was $5.00 per car for ground loading at a storage yard where the driver had to wander the yard and get the cars that were being loaded; $0.36 per mile loaded (even one car left on the truck was considered loaded miles); $0.31 per mile empty and $5.00 per delivery stop. If one of the vehicles on the load was a full-size supercab pickup, or another larger vehicle that took the space of two cars, a premium of $5.00 was paid for loading.
When we were loading at Oakville, we were loading non-clearcoat Ford Tempos and Mercury Topazes built at the Oakville Assembly Plant (clearcoat cars were built in Kansas City, Missouri, and brought in by rail). F-Series trucks were built next door at the Ontario Truck Plant, as well as U.S.-built vehicles, such as Aerostars and Rangers brought in from the States by rail.
We also hauled Jeep YJs out of Brampton, which I was told at the time was the only plant in the world building that body style, for all world markets. That plant was closed and torn down in the early ’90s. We hauled Eagle Premiers out of the brand-new plant in nearby Bramalea, which had been recently acquired with Chrysler’s purchase of AMC; the plant now builds Dodge Challengers and Chargers, as well as Chrysler 300s. And we hauled imports, mainly Hyundai Excels and Nissan 240SXs at a receiving yard in Mississauga.
Since all these plants also built vehicles for the U.S. market, we took loads of those vehicles to terminals in Buffalo, Fort Erie, Ontario, and a couple of terminals in the greater Detroit area. We would deliver our loads to those terminals and load up with vehicles built in the U.S. and Mexico for the Canadian market.
The longer runs required staying out overnight, in which case a dispatcher would book a hotel room at the driver’s request. Maris had accounts at hotels in Ottawa, Windsor, etc., and they were nice hotels. Most of today’s car haulers have sleeper cabs, eliminating the expense of hotels.
Our truck fleet at Oakville consisted of about 200 trucks, with an almost an even split between Ford L9000s (also known as Louisvilles, for the plant in which they were built) and GMC Brigadiers, with a couple of Chevy Bruins in the mix, and there were nine Mack Econodynes.
Transit damage was considered a part of the job, and no driver could say they never created any damage. They ranged from minor scratches to complete destruction of a vehicle – usually from hitting an overpass – and everything in between. There was one driver at the company who had built a dubious reputation for damaging cars, including the aforementioned overpass-type incident, all of which earned him the nickname “Cap’n Crunch.” Needless to say, it was not an easy job to get fired from that job.
The money I made when I was busy was such that I only needed to work one week each month to cover my living expenses; my car was paid for, and the rent on my apartment at the time was $444 a month, including utilities and underground parking. There were lean times, too, during which I had to work at a driver’s overload service to make up the difference. Also, most of the assembly plants would shut down for a couple of weeks in August to tool up for the new model year.
Getting fired was not easy but getting laid off was a risk in a trucking job that was largely dependent on the auto industry; then as now, it was feast or famine. With the onset of a recession in 1989, I received my layoff notice, and my last day as a Maris car hauler was September 30, 1989. It was a Saturday, and I picked up a load of Jeep YJs at Brampton, delivered the whole load in Windsor, and drove back to Oakville empty. My gross pay that week, in which I only worked three days, was about $500. To this day, I miss that job!
