Strictly No BS

Story and photos: Wayne Munro

At just 66, Spud Bonner has clocked-up 50 years with the same company...while it’s gone through four different sets of owners (himself included)

Spud: Strictly no BS

TARANAKI TRUCKIE PETER (SPUD) BONNER’S CAREER BEHIND

the wheel is remarkable. You might even say it borders on the incredible.

He has, after all, driven fulltime for over 50 years….for the same trucking operation, in the same tiny township (Toko) where he grew up.

Not only that: Before he started at Aitken Brothers (now Aitken Transport), at 16, he’d already put in four or five years with the company, working after school and on weekends!

Amazing alright – but just don’t expect him to talk about it in those terms: Getting all excited and raving on about all that he’s seen and done as a truck driver is not the kind of bloke he is. He’s strictly no BS.

And so, instead, the 66-year-old Spud says simply: “It’s been good.”

Yeah but mate….seriously. It clearly IS pretty bloody outthere – staying in the same job, in the same town, for five decades! How come he’s been such a constant in Toko’s modest transport company – even while it’s had four different sets of owners (him included).

He reflects for a moment, then reckons: “Never thought about it really.” Then he does offer this: “Yeah well – didn’t really want to move on.

“It’s a passion I ‘spose eh. You don’t give it up, do you.”

The passion was sparked by a couple of things: “Always wanted to be a truck driver. Dad (Alan Bonner) always had bulldozers, trucks….”

And the Bonner family home was, conveniently, straight across the road from the Aitken yard.

Says Spud: “I remember in primary school deciding that driving trucks was what I wanted to do. I think working with livestock was an attraction too.”

When Pete was a kid, given to hanging around the yard, Russell Aitken was running the company (which he’d started in 1952, with brother Errol), with Russell’s sons – Rod, Chum and Barry – doing the driving.

Spud remembers “just goin’ in after school, jumpin’ in the trucks.”

Above left: Four-wheeler J Bedford runabout truck was Spud’s first drive. Above right: A couple of years after he started with Aitkens he got his dream job - carting livestock all around the North Island in this Commer and its two-axle trailer

By the time he was a teenager, he could be gone for hours in one of the stock trucks: Sometimes “you didn’t get home till two or three in the morning. Go to Longburn, or Palmerston North, Patea, Hawera.”

The Aitkens didn’t mind him tagging along. It may have helped, he suggests, that “the old sheep crates in those days, they didn’t have lift-up floors. You had to crawl underneath.” The perfect job for an enthusiastic schoolboy.

Back in those days the Aitken fleet, which numbered around seven trucks, was a completely Commer line-up, if he remembers right. It’s always been around that size.

When the Stratford High School headmaster asked what Spud wanted to do when he left school, “I said I wanted to be a truck driver. He told me there was too much heavy lifting – I wouldn’t be able to handle it.

“Because, in the old days, they were big sacks and that eh. There was a lot of manual work.”

Regardless, heavy lifting was exactly what he was soon doing – and lots of it.

Bulk railway wagons full of coal would be parked up in the old railways shed at Toko: “We’d bag it up – three of ya. One shovelling, one lifting the bags and one wheeling them away.

“Big sacks. Oh, they were quite heavy! I ‘spose they’d be 50kgs. We used to bag it and deliver it around the town.”

Even before he joined Aitkens fulltime “I used to cart the coal up from the station to the factory – about a K. Started that at 15 or 16…”

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So how was it – getting his dream job straight out of school? In typically understated Spud fashion, he says simply: “Felt good.”

And what did he get paid? “Aw Christ – bugger-all!” But enough to keep a young bloke happy, it seems. After all, he points out, “half a dozen big bottles of beer would be $2.70.”

Toko back in those days was a buzzy little place, with the trucking company, a sawmill and a dairy factory all going strong. On a hot day, the Toko pub was heaving.

“In summertime there’d be metal trucks, stock trucks, tar trucks, logging trucks….parked both sides of the road all the way down to the hall.

“By four o’clock on a Friday they’d all be jammed in the pub. Two pool tables going…. And there’d be a fight. Yeah, I suppose we did drink quite a bit!”

The company got a dispensation for Pete to officially get behind the wheel before he was 18. He started out on a fourwheeler J Bedford with a 16-foot deck and a petrol engine – working locally: “Yeah, wasn’t a bad little truck. You could put a crate on it. Did a lot of haymaking too.”

After a year or so on that, he moved on to driving “an old Commer bulk truck, with a Perkins motor. Just carting [fertiliser] to airstrips mainly. That was alright.

“You’d go out to Te Wera and cart fert off the rail there. They’d want 100 tons for the Lands & Survey Makahu block, 100 tons for Lands & Survey Pohokura Block. That was all clamshelled off. Then you had to get in there and shovel (the rest of) it out of the wagons.” Spud with his awards from Ia Ara Aotearoa Transporting NZ and National Road Carriers - recognising his 50-year contribution to the industry

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