After 76 Years, Valley Cartage Keeps on Truckin'

One of the most interesting jobs I ever held was when I worked for Gemini Transportation, a subchapter S corporation of Schanno Transportation in St. Paul, from 1979 to 1981. The office was located on Second Street in Hudson, in a second floor office between the Professional Building and .

The company employed city drivers for Schanno who ran local deliveries. As an S corporation, it was located in Wisconsin because of vast savings in unemployment and workman’s compensation insurance. Part of my job entailed phone duty with long-haul owner-operators also affiliated with the company.

Truckers called daily asking for cash advances to pay things like lumpers to help unload or a hotel room when they were tired of their sleeper cabs. For me the call was an opportunity to learn about the country vicariously while I detained the InstaCom check code and likely wasted plenty of company and driver time chatting with the guys.

I was attending technical college for graphic communications, but the journalist in me was evidently budding. Because they were such great storytellers, I just loved talking with the truckers, quizzing them on where they were, where they were going and what different parts of the country were like.

They’d advise me to avoid places like an I-80 truck stop notorious for sleeper leapers of all genders or the Nevada counties where prostitution was, and still is, legal. Long before the Internet information explosion, they were valuable sources for everything from the best vantage points of the Grand Canyon to the best pizza in New York. In a time before cell phones, it was comforting to know that if I’d ever breakdown on the road, a trucker would likely rescue me.

I held the part-time job until Gemini became a casualty of the Motor Carrier Act of 1980, when sweeping deregulation of price controls, market entry controls and collective pricing was signed by President Jimmy Carter and enacted during the Ronald Reagan years. Schanno closed Gemini in 1981 and brought its operations back over to its Minnesota headquarters.

A Hudson Trucking Firm Survives and Thrives

Last week I had the opportunity to recall my Gemini days when I talked trucking with Todd and Jerry Gilbert, the second- and third-generation owners of , a trucking company with a long history in Hudson started by Jerry’s father Norman in 1935. Jerry has been selected as a Distinguished Alumnus of Hudson High School, to be awarded Sept. 14.

As a family-owned trucking firm with millions of miles under its belt, Valley Cartage survived deregulation to become one of the fastest growing LTL (less-than-truckload) providers in the Midwest. It has also successfully launched an international logistics service, Valley Management Group, despite the economic swings of the last few decades.

Valley Cartage is growing, and in early 2011 it acquired Van Someren Transfer of Baldwin, another third-generational trucking firm founded by John Van Someren in 1917.

You can read about Valley Cartage’s business history and future in the forthcoming Chronicle newsletter from the St. Croix Economic Development Corporation, which honored the company with a Business of the Year Award this year. In the meantime, I wanted to ask Jerry, who is 63 and who joined his father’s company in 1970, some of the questions I might have asked Gemini’s truckers.

How did your dad Norman get into trucking?

He got his first job after he bought his first truck, an old Model T. He delivered some horses to Trempealeau for $1.50. He then started hauling cattle to the South St. Paul stockyards, crops to the elevators and machinery for area farmers. His brother bought the feed mill in Hudson so he then started hauling for him. He also hauled for a huge hardware distributor, FOK [Farwell, Ozmun, and Kirk, & Co.], in St. Paul to Mueller’s hardware store in Hudson. He actually sold out in 1958 to Hennepin Trucking of St. Paul, which wanted the authority to run to Chicago. He then worked for the company, but two years later started what today is Valley Cartage with Tony Zeuli from Hudson; he bought out his partner in 1975.

What were some of Norman’s favorite memories of the road that he shared with family and friends?

When he first started in the 1930s there was a bad drought in this area, like other areas of the country. He rented a larger tractor-trailer and went to North Dakota to pick up a load of hay for the farmers here and on his way back in the morning, he pulled over in a little town, went into a barbershop and got a fresh shave. He got back in the truck, drove about an hour and thought to himself, “Gee, this looks familiar.” It turned out he was going the wrong way.

When I was working for him we hauled a lot of supplies for a man named “Nick the plumber” in Hudson. It was a Friday and he told his driver that he had to get the pipe today, as Nick had a big job on Saturday that must get done. In late afternoon, the driver got back without the pipe, and my Dad said, “What did you do? Where’s the pipe?” The driver said, “I stopped and got a hair cut and when I got there the place was closed.” “What the (expletive)!” yelled my Dad. That was about the most upset I’d ever seen him. The driver replied, “My hair grows on company time so I get it cut on company time.” Boy, was Dad mad.

How did you get started into trucking?

When I started working for him in 1970, he had two straight trucks, two tractors, and double the employees. As a kid, I always remember being around the shop because we lived across the street [the green-and-white original shop was built in 1948 next what is now O’Connell’s Funeral Home]. I’d be sweeping the floors, washing trucks, and just getting in Dad’s way. I’m sure there was a lot of time he wanted to shoe me out. But he was so easygoing; if I was impatient or complained I was bored, he’d always find something for me to do. Once I started driving, then it was a natural.

What are some of your favorite memories riding in the truck with your Dad?

When I was 10 or 12 I loved going on the night run from Hudson to Eau Claire. The reason I wanted to go was because there was a candy machine at the Eau Claire dock, and we didn’t have one at the Hudson dock. I would sleep there and on the way back, but Dad would always wake me up and buy me a candy bar at the dock when we got to Eau Claire.

Another one was when I was driving and Dad was in the cab with me. We were going north on Second Street in Hudson and coming down the hill, under the railroad bridge underpass right before the North Hudson bridge. The right front tire blew, and I had quite a time getting it to come to a stop. We stopped right in front of the Dairy Mart, which was on the banks of Lake Mallalieu. He didn’t like water, and he said, very relieved, “Oh boy, I’m glad you got this thing stopped before we hit the water.”

How did your son Todd, who is president of Valley Cartage, get interested in the business?

It wasn’t always that way. Like me—and his brother Eric, who now heads Hudson operations—Todd used to hang out in the shop sweeping floors and washing trucks as a kid. But when he went off to college, we loaded up a truck with his stuff and when I dropped him off I said, “When you are done with college, the business will be here for you.” Todd said, “Nope. No way. I’m not interested.” Then he had to do a business internship for his degree so he decided to intern with us, and everything changed. He started from the ground up, learning everything, and really enjoyed it. Now we like to say Todd’s the gas, and I’m the brakes.

When Todd was driving in the late 1990s, he was at a dock filling out paperwork when another local carrier, Neal Thomas, backed in next to him. Neal said, “Look, we are both half-full, why don’t you just buy me out?” Three or four months later we struck a deal and Neal came to work for us. Todd respects what’s come before him, and that has really helped him grow our business.