Big rigs, those gleaming behemoths with catchy names and slogans stenciled across their trailers, tantalized Kenny Luken when as a teenager he watched them zooming along the interstate from his tractor seat while tilling fields north of Goodland.
The fascination of logging long-distance treks stuck, and eventually came true.
Fast forward 40 years. Recently, Luken has found himself interested in farm tractors and the freedom of not counting the miles. After 4.2 million miles of driving, “I’m sick of it,” he said Wednesday.
His wife, Peggy, agreed.
“It’s nice to wake up each morning at home,” she said.
For the five years of their marriage the two have spent the greater share of their time within the confines of a truck. It could be cozy, they allowed, but lacked the obvious advantages of space for a recliner or the outdoor opportunities of planting a garden. Being in one place also will allow Peggy to contemplate going back to work as a certified nurse’s aide.
Today is Luken’s 60th birthday and there’s a party planned — for his birthday and retirement, as well as to recognize May Day.
They’ll have good food, something to wet their whistles, plenty of family on hand and a Maypole with streamers attached.
“We all grab the streamers and kind of dance and weave back and forth in opposite directions,” Luken said.
LUKEN WASN’T that enthused about trucking early in his career because it kept him away from home and first wife, Jackie.
He first tried selling insurance before the family moved to a farm north of Moran.
After three months of frowns and refusals, Luken decided he wasn’t cut out to be a salesman, so he hit the road, first with Mid-West Transportation out of Fort Scott, then later with Tri-State Motor Transit, a Joplin-based trucking firm. Eight years later he switched to J.B. Hunt, a Lowell, Ark., company that today is one of the largest trucking outfits in the country, but he liked Tri-State better and returned a second time.
In 1998, he moved over to R & R Trucking, another Joplin-based carrier that specializes in hauling munitions, explosives and radioactive materials.
In 2004, Jackie died from a heart attack.
The loss prompted Luken to try an Internet dating service which yielded a Peggy Cox. Intrigued, each paid a $25 fee to exchange e-mails.
An investment in gasoline would have better. They discovered their homes were only a few miles apart, his in Moran and hers in Gas. They started dating and rather than be separated by his on-the-road stints, she enrolled in truck driving school at Fort Scott Community College.
“She graduated first in a class of 40,” Luken said, and immediately became his driving partner.
“IT’S NOT LIKE it used to be,” Luken said. “When I started I was driving a little cab-over truck and there wasn’t much room.”
Today’s rigs have elaborate sleeping quarters separated from the cab by a leather curtain.
“There’s a bed bigger than twin-size, a microwave and refrigerator,” Peggy said, and in newer trucks a generator to run heating and air-conditioning for extended rest periods.
Their driving together day after day was a good test of compatibility, Luken said.
“If you can survive each other in the cab of a truck 24/7 for as long we did, you know the marriage is going to work,” Peggy observed.
They married May 15, 2005, and continued until late April driving transports that carried mostly sensitive loads bound for military bases throughout the nation. Their consignments often were explosives, including artillery shells and other ordnance, and weapons, from small caliber to heavy machine guns.
Occasionally loads were radioactive. Luken had to complete a two-week police training program and was armed during trips, some into Canada.
“At the border I had to give up my weapons and a Canadian Mountie, with a machine gun, rode with me the rest of the way,” he said.
Other trips were also beyond the ordinary.
“One time I hauled rocket fuel in a refrigerated trailer and the temperature had to be between 40 and 50 degrees. If it got too cold it was useless. If it got too hot, I would have picked up speed — to about 6,000 miles an hour,” Luken said.
Another of his assignments was to deliver rocket boosters from Utah to the Cape Kennedy Space Center in Florida for shuttle missions.
WHEN LUKEN drove his first transport as a professional, he already had experience behind the wheel.
“One day when I was 5 years old, Dad jokingly told me to get the tractor on our dairy farm,” he said. “I did. I had to push with all of my weight on the starter button of the old Ferguson, but I got it going.”
By age 12 he was driving farm trucks regularly, particularly during harvest. His first experience with a highway rig came two years later.
“Me and some buddies were playing cards one Saturday night and Dad had three loads of cows to move,” Luken recalled. “The drivers were drunk, so we went to the feedlot, loaded the cows and drove the back roads from Goodland to the stock yards in Denver.”
During his high school days, Luken worked on wheat harvest crews, starting early in the season in Texas and following ripened grain into Canada.
With his thirst of travel slaked, Luken is ready to set down roots.
He started a new business, Groundskeeper Kenny, “which will have me on a tractor, much like the one I was riding 40-some years ago when I watched the rigs rolling along on the highway,” he said.
It’s not often one can experience both sides of the fence.
