LEGENDS
ROD DOW
T
HIS MONTH’S SOUTHPAC LEGEND, Rod Dow, was literally born into a transport company. Three years before his arrival, his parents, Dennis and Cynthia Dow, went into partnership with his uncle and aunt, Jim and Bev Barker, to buy a small King Country carrying firm, renaming it Otorohanga Transport. Jim and Cynthia were siblings. Consequently, you could say that the company would be his future, like it or not. But he did like it. As he recalls, even the young fantasy games had a transport bias: “When we were little kids we used to be always around the yard. In those days pretty well everyone smoked, and I can remember us going to the dairy and buying those little lollies you could get at the time that looked like cigarettes, then sitting in the truck cabs pretending we were drivers. “It’s a shame nowadays that young people aren’t able to be exposed to the trucks the way we were. Every school holiday, drivers would have their kids in the cab with them, but health and safety changes have meant that this is pretty much stopped. As a kid I lived in the depot.
62 | Truck & Driver
“In the early days of the business Dad looked after the mechanical side, while Uncle Jim mainly worked with clients. After Dad died – of a heart attack, aged 45 – Uncle Jim took on both sides of the job to keep the company going. Mum stayed on, doing administration and office work.” Cynthia, along with Rod and his sister Carolyn, are still shareholders and active directors of the OTL Group, which in 2008 was split off from the wider Barker Group. When he left school Rod didn’t jump straight into driving, he says: “I did an apprenticeship in engine reconditioning, and after I finished my time I went over to Aussie for a few months, as you do. When I came back, I then joined Otorohanga Transport, driving trucks for a while before moving into the workshop as fleet service manager. “This went on for a few years before I moved into the office, as dispatcher. That was my role for many years until essentially, I became the boss – out of the day-to-day running, now, but doing a whole lot of other stuff. “Don’t get me wrong, I also enjoy the
office work, but dispatching especially can be very hard on family life. With a trucking firm like ours, it’s pretty much a 24-hour activity.” Among the “other stuff” is a return to Rod’s career roots, and he reckons that he quite likes “mucking around in the workshop fixing trucks. “I’ve always had a fascination with pulling mechanical things apart, not only to see what might be wrong with them but also to see how they’re designed. On what you could call the hobby side, I have a mid-80s Mack Ultraliner I’m doing up at the moment. It was originally run by Fulton Hogan down in the South Island, but I’ve now got it painted up in OTL colours. We had a couple of Ultraliners in the fleet at
