March 2007 - Bill Suvan

By John White

Bill Suvan is this issues Rig of the Month and this is his story:

Thirty years goes by quick when you’re having fun. During that time I’ve worked with some great people; found that once in a lifetime woman, who’s also my best friend, and we have two kids that we’re proud of. I think my life is a true reflection of how my parent’s raised me. They taught me to work hard, love long and above all treat people fair.

I was born in Grande Prairie, Alberta in 1956 and lived there till 1960 when my folks moved to Edmonton. Dad owned Reliable Tire from 1951 until 1959 and some of my first memories were riding in the company’s 1956 International 1 ton.

In 1961 Dad joined the Edmonton Fire Department and stayed there until retiring as a Senior Captain in 1990. I have always been close to my folks and especially proud of my Dad. Because of Dad’s shift work when I was young we spent a lot of time camping in the Coal Branch area of Alberta.

When my Dad was a young man he worked for my Grandfather’s scrap metal business so I grew up on Dad’s trucking stories about hauling scrap metal from the abandoned coal mines of Cadomin, Stercoal, and Mercoal, south of Hinton. Later the added exposure to all the big shiny fire trucks only fueled my passion for machinery.

After graduating high school in 1974 I went to NAIT and took Civil Engineering but fast cars (and women) cost money so I quit after the first year. In the summer of 1975 I went to work for Canpave, a small paving company owned by Charlie Fransoo and family; namely his two sons Lyndon and Darrel. It was there that I found out I had an aptitude for running machinery –on tracks or wheels.  Over the next three summers I operated every machine he had. That also included getting my Class 1 with air the second summer I was there.

Not all these experiences were positive. My first run in with winches, beds, and gin poles, for instance, ended rather embarrassingly. It started out with an old 12 series Cat grader on which everything was gear driven. As was common with older machinery they were dangerous in that if you were moving too fast and hit something fairly solid the levers could kick back hard enough to break your wrists.

One morning, at about 4 a.m., I tried to sneak the grader across town without having to haul it. I was going down Grierson Hill in Edmonton and I guess you could say it was a little shy on brakes since it hadn’t really had any since 1952. About halfway down the hill the manual transmission kicked out of gear and away we went. Lyndon was following me in the winch truck, a 1965 International three ton with a deck and gin poles, pulling a pintle hitch trailer with a paver on it. This gave him a bird’s eye view of my dilemma. The only way I could slow down the grader was to drop the blade. To do that I had to put both feet on the hand levers, hold onto the steering wheel, and push.

Lyndon figured the grader was doing about 30 mp/h when we hit bottom and he says we were throwing little pieces of asphalt and sparks fifty feet out each side. When it finally stopped my feet and legs hurt so much I didn’t even feel it when I dropped my feet off the levers and one foot hit the decelerator. This instantly killed the diesel motor, and totally screwed us.

Did I mention that the pup motor to start the diesel had quit working in 1964 (which compared to the brakes was fairly recent) and we always parked the grader with the blade up so we could pull start it? With the blade down the only way to get the grader started was to lift the front wheels off the ground and pull it, and we had to be quick because the sun and various law enforcement officials were about to appear.

We unhooked the trailer and started to set up the poles. I was 19 and Lyndon was 20 at the time and we had seen it done once before by old Charlie, so it couldn’t be all that hard. After considerable cussing we had the grader hooked with the front wheels off the ground. Now all we had to do was pull it. There was no way I was getting back in that grader that soon so I hopped in the pole truck and Lyndon got in the grader.

Everyone who has pulled with gin poles knows what a hold back chain is, unfortunately that didn’t include us. So with no hold back chain, I put the winch truck in gear and started to pull. Everything was going good until Lyndon engaged the clutch on the grader and it stopped dead and the winch truck didn’t. With the pulling point on the poles 15 feet off the ground the rear wheels kept going and in an instant the front wheels went up. The Edmonton Journal had a great picture of the truck the next day sitting back on its tail skirt with the nose pointing straight up looking more like an space shuttle about to launch than a truck.

During the first two winters that I worked with Canpave, I, like many other red blooded Alberta boys with limited skills, went to work in the oil patch. I started as a swamper on a picker truck for Miller Oilfield Hauling out of Nisku, hauling pipe to the rigs.

I was paired with Tom Richardson, a veteran driver, who was an absolute wizard with a 5 x 4 tranny. In five months time Tom showed me, driving skills and work ethics that have stood the test of time. We hauled pipe through some of the toughest off road country that AB, BC, NWT and the Yukon has to offer and never missed a day or had a claim. I really feel that if every potential driver had to go thorough this observation and trial period that there would be far less accidents and claims in the industry.

The second winter with Miller I came back as a driver, having earned my class 1 with Canpave that summer. I owe Miller Oilfield a depth of gratitude for taking on a young driver and giving him a chance. Mind you, Tom’s promise to kick my butt if I screwed up might of helped encourage me to keep focused on the job at hand. 

For the next 14 years I worked for various oilfield and heavy haul companies in the winters and hauled or operated machinery through the summers. I witnessed some incredible acts of heroism, loads of comedy and some unbelievable stupid mistakes. One such incident comes to mind and always makes me smile.

In the early eighties the Forestry Trunk Road was a nightmare of hills, switchbacks, narrow bridges with, depending on the weather, an abundance of mud, rain or dust. But that didn’t slow us down because oilfield activity along the eastern slope of the Rockies was booming.

One very hot August afternoon, I was running a winch tractor for Dennis Anger Enterprises out of Edmonton and we were moving a Loughland 93 from the Waiprous area to Nordegg, Alberta. Its about 150 kilometres as the crow flies and around 250 kilometres on the Trunk Road. With me at the time was Dennis Anger himself and Kenny Beeswanger (both these gentlemen sadly no longer with us). Along the way we had to ford the Red Deer River because heavy truck traffic was not allowed on the old bridge at that time. The river ford was downstream out of sight of the bridge. It wasn’t bad as fords go, about three feet deep and 100 meters across with crystal clear water. The river banks on the other side however were about twenty meters long, fairly steep, and once wet extremely slippery. The best way to get across without getting wet was to tie the trucks together and push/pull each other up the far bank.

While we were hooking the trucks nose to tail, upriver thirty of Canada’s top business women boarded three rubber rafts to embark on what was supposed to be the highlight of a week long convention. It was billed as a leisurely float down the Red Deer River to Sundre. The estimated trip time was about four hours.

To our surprise we had just driven all three trucks and trailers into the river when the caravan of rafts came around the bend. Thank god no one was hurt but even Kenny Beeswanger learned some new cusswords by the time we rescued all the passengers and winched the last of the sunken rafts out of the river.

We now had the job of transporting the rafts and the totally soaked and po’d shipwrecked passengers into Sundre. This trip was over 100 kilometres of very rough, dusty roads and by the time we delivered our unhappy passengers, the cream of Canada’s businesswomen looked like they had been rolled and then baked in mud. I think it’s safe to say that in one day the three of us probably set Alberta’s fledgling raft industry back by at least 10 years.

In 1989 I was working for Santa Fe Pipeline Construction out of Calgary and had been since 1986. Starting as a lowboy driver I had worked my way up to foreman and all-around troubleshooter. Parked at home were a baby monster truck, corvette convertible, dune buggy and a pair of mountain horses. My little black book was full and at 32 I had life by the horns. But apparently, according to my future wife, I was desperately unhappy.

That all changed one night at the Ranch-mans in Calgary, a quiet little gathering spot noted for its sophistication and elegance. (Yeah right). About 10 p.m. that night I was accosted by an older woman, who grilled me intensely for about 15 minutes and then introduced me to her daughter. Within five minutes we were on the dance floor and I was in love. Anyone who says love at first sight doesn’t happen is totally wrong. It does and did happen. Her name was Deidre, and she was perfect. We were married a year later and within two years we had our son Ryan.

Dynasty Construction bought Santa Fe in 1991 and promptly overextended themselves, forcing the companies into bankruptcy. I had a wife and young son and the oil patch was in a slump so we moved to Hudson Hope BC where Dee had grown up and her Dad still lived. We purchased two older logging trucks and went to work hauling stump to dump for logging contractors in the area. The first one was a 1981 Western Star with a 400 Cummins and a 15 speed; the second was a pristine 1979 Kenworth C500 with a 475hp 8V92 Detroit and a 13 speed. Hudson Hope was a great place to live and play for an adult, but had limited opportunities for kids. With the birth of our daughter Jessie in 1994 we knew our time there was limited. In 1996 we traded in the C500 and logging rigging, paid off our parts bill and purchased a beautiful 1982 long nose Pete 379 with a 60-inch flattop. The Pete had 475hp Silver 8V92, a 20 speed Spicer and 46 rears on an aluminum frame. We financed the truck with Inland Kenworth in Fort St. John and picked it up with a totally rebuilt motor.

Moving back to Gibbons, Alberta, just north of Edmonton, we bought a big house with 16 acres for the kids and horses. Dee started breeding and training Tennessee Walking Horses as a full time job and I went to work with Continental Cartage where I spent the next 4 years. The Silver 92 worked great on the ice roads of the Arctic where Continental bought the fuel and where most of their winter work was but it was a bear on fuel the rest of the year. By the spring of 2000 I was getting fairly discouraged. With fifty thousand dollars in repair bills and 3 miles to the gallon, I had to refinance the truck to break even, but we were in too deep. Then the other shoe dropped, Dee, at 30 years of age, had to have emergency open-heart surgery to repair an aneurysm and then complications set in. It was clear we couldn’t keep the Pete so I let Inland take it back. I sold our big house and moved a little further north to Radway Alberta. It was a smaller home, more land, way smaller mortgage and I worked locally till Dee was back on her feet.  

Just a bit of advice for anybody thinking of buying a truck - make sure that the tractor is specked for the work you’re doing.  A great heavy haul truck won’t make a highway tractor and vice versa. If you’re losing money on the first trip then two trips will only get you twice as far in debt.

In the spring of 2000 Murray Craddock of Craddock Trucking (Circle T Lines) offered me a chance to take over a retiring lease operator’s truck pulling super B convertibles in Western Canada. I jumped at the chance. The tractor was a 1998 FLD 120 Freightliner mid roof with a N14 460+525hp Cummins, 18 speed, and 46 rears. Murray helped arrange financing and stood behind me till we got back on our feet. The money was great and I was home most weekends but by Christmas of 2003 I was dreading the thought of tarping through another Western Canadian winter. Tarping in the rain in Vancouver was one thing but un-tarping at thirty below in Edmonton was something else. With heavy heart I resigned from Craddock and went to work for Stoodley Transport hauling super B grain buckets in Western Canada.

In January 2004 knowing the FLD was getting miled out and not wanting to repeat past mistakes, I walked into Kamloops Freightliner and traded up to my present truck.  The 2000 yellow Eagle has a 3406E, 550 Cat, 18 speed and Super 40 gears.  It came with extended warranty till 1,300,000 km.  The truck was previously owned by an owner/operator with Mullens Trucking and I’d like to thank him for taking such good care of her.

In October 2005, I had my first wreck where a truck I was driving was damaged and this lead to a major run in with I.C.B.C. The accident was 100% the four-wheeler’s fault as told in the editorial column of the February issue of Pro-Trucker Magazine. Mountain High Truck and Trailer Repair in Salmon Arm, B.C. put the Eagle back together and did a really good job considering the damage on the truck. When I went to pick up my truck I was told that since I had a GST number I had to pay the GST on the repairs. I didn’t think this was fair so I appealed to the Federal GST Laws and Rulings Board and they agreed with me.

By the time the summer of 2006 rolled around the Eagle was getting tired and at fifty years of age, so was I.  The price of fuel and the rising costs of everything else had taken all the fun out of it and I was ready for a change of careers. I hated the thought of selling the Eagle because for the last 3 years it had served double duty hauling a nine-horse trailer for camping trips to the mountains and various other locations.

I heard that Ted Sara of Sara Trucking was looking for another truck to do city work so I offered him the Eagle on payments.  Leaving Stoodley Transport was extremely hard as I have never worked for a nicer bunch of people.  I wish them all the best.

Ted and I made a deal in which I would drive the truck for a month until he could find a driver and if I liked the work, I would keep my truck. Knowing I was going to hate city day work I agreed to help him out. Much to my surprise by the end of two weeks I found that I not only enjoyed it but I was looking forward to work in the morning. It may not be for everyone, but for those of us with older trucks and who want to be home every night, it’s a good way to make a living with a better than average revenue.

Since I don’t work weekends, I get to spend a lot of quality time with my family. I also coach hockey and help out with my daughter’s 4-H club. The only drawback is that everyday Dee seems to find more & more chores for me to do and this has got me thinking. All these chores miraculously seemed to have got done when I was working on the highway so I’m beginning to suspect there might be a neglected boyfriend out there somewhere.  If so - it’s my turn fella - so move on.

My main contractor now is MTE Logistics and I’ve found them very fair and reliable to work with. They are currently in the process of re-organizing the company operations and the future looks bright.

It’s been a good ride for the most part so far and who knows, with this new career path, we might be good for another 30 years. In the mean time, watch for the yellow Eagle, trailer in tow, hauling the horses to a mountain near you.  Happy Trails.   r

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