Overdrive Magazine | Trucking Business News & Owner Operator Info
Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/963441
Custom Rigs April 2018 | Overdrive | 57 I ndependent owner- operator Jeremy Ward always liked the look of the 1995 Peterbilt 379 that his dad owned throughout the 2000s. He liked it so much that, a few years after Jerry Ward sold it, Jeremy bought it back for his own use and even entered into a lease-purchase program with the eet that owned it to get his dad's old rig back under family ownership. The younger Ward, 36, of Clare, Michigan, was actually the rst person to put a bug in his dad's ear about buying the truck at the turn of the century. "I was in high school and saw the truck going down the freeway," he says. "I called my dad and told him I saw the coolest- looking Peterbilt. It was Kawasaki green with a checkered ag going down the side. Back then, you didn't see bright green trucks like you do now. He didn't seem interested then, but he ended up buying it about a year later." In 2010, Jerry, an inde- pendent owner-operator himself, was ready to get out of the industry. He drove the truck for a local trucking company, Hog Wild Transportation, for a year or so before they bought it from him. "He always loved that truck," Jeremy says. "My plan was to buy it back and x it up maybe gie it back to him. Now I use it in my own business." In the mid-2000s, Jer- emy had been an indepen- dent owner-operator doing business as Wild Ride xpress but he sold all his trucks in 2008 with the recession. "I said in 2008 I'd never own another truck, but then I just had to buy this one because it was my dad's," he says. In 2014, Jeremy ap- proached Hog Wild about buying the truck. It had spent a lot of time parked on the eet's lot and was looking a little run down. Jeremy did a Like father, like son Son earns back family's '95 Pete 379 BY MATT COLE Jeremy Ward bought this 1995 Peterbilt 379 through a lease-purchase program beginning in 2014 and says he's putting money into the truck "every day" to improve it and make it his own. He has repainted it himself twice, sanded down and repolished the aluminum and more. Jeremy Ward says his father, being "old school," never would run his old truck with the "new-school" look Jeremy has added to it. Jeremy Ward, left, with his father, Jerry, in 2006, when Jerry owned the green 379. At the time, both Wards had their own authority.