Dick Hubert’s Worldview: An historic woman pioneer’s story in the long haul trucking industry
March 28, 2024 at 1:10 a.m.
Women’s History Month is drawing to a close, but not before I give a special salute to one of the pioneer women long haul truck drivers in the United States, Kathy Dyson, who with her husband and driving partner Ed is a “two million miler”—an elite status in a profession crucial to the U.S. economy.
I met Kathy and Ed on a recent trip (by cruise ship) to Hawaii, and Kathy’s story is so special that I felt compelled to research and write this column—with her and Ed’s help and that of the current head of the Dysons’ longtime employer, Andrew Boyle, co-president of Boyle Transportation and chairman of the American Trucking Associations (ATA).
You can see Kathy and Ed in the photo accompanying this column. It was taken on Sept. 26, 2006, well into their 15th year with Boyle. They retired in 2008. I met them both in their 80th birthday year, successfully retired, and as has been their custom, seeing the world together.
Ed and Kathy were high school sweethearts, and as she told me, even when she met Ed, he was “enthralled” with the whole idea of long haul driving and wasn’t even driving yet. Kathy picked up on the idea of long haul driving and “started thinking about it when I was 18 before we ever married.”
So, how did they get
from Point A to Point B?
Initially Kathy was the stay-at-home mom raising two sons while Ed worked local trucking jobs.
When the kids were in elementary school, Kathy decided to work part-time to help save the money for a down payment on a house. She worked as a tax preparer for H&R Block, enabling the couple to buy their first home in West Bridgewater, Mass.
In 1984, Kathy went to a local trade school and learned how to be a computer programmer and got a job in that field.
Then Ed got a driving job in Maine in 1976, and they moved, prompting Kathy to take care of their special needs son full-time while the other son went to school. But when their special needs son died and the other son went away to college, as Kathy put it, “that gave us an empty nest, and I decided it was time to drive a truck.”
Kathy again went to school and got her license for long haul truck driving—those 18 wheelers you see on the highway. When that license was finally in hand, Ed and Kathy became a long haul driving couple—or as Ed puts it, a “driving over the road” couple.
What it was like being a pioneer
I asked Kathy for the highs and lows of her career.
“Showering was a problem the first five to 10 years,” she said. “The truck stops only had male showers.” Her dual solution: “a lot of deodorant” plus Ed “guarding the shower doors in the men’s room.”
Even getting a cup of coffee was a challenge.
As Kathy told me:
“As a woman on the road, in a truck stop after dark, if you got out of the truck and walked into the restaurant, it was assumed that you were a “lady of the evening”—a prostitute. If I wanted to go in and get a cup of coffee while Ed was asleep, I had to be a little forceful and still very lady like to get waited on.”
“We were ignored. It wasn’t the truck drivers—well, they ignored us women anyway, it was the waitresses that ignored us more. But that changed over time once I started wearing a uniform. We had worked for a couple of companies that provided uniforms, and in a uniform, I was taken seriously. But in jeans and a blouse I was not.”
It wasn’t just truck stops that were a problem.
Customers were, too.
Per Kathy:
“As I got older, my hair turned gray, and I thought it was pretty. But then I realized I was not being treated like an equal truck driver; I was being treated like a little old lady by the shippers and receivers, and that’s not what I wanted.
So I went and I had my hair dyed for the first time. And the attitudes of the shippers and receivers changed overnight. By changing my hair color, I became one of the truck drivers, and I was treated equally. I kept up with that whole routine until I retired, and I haven’t dyed it since. I’m now a natural!”
A trucking life’s high points
Kathy and Ed have had more than their share of adventures together, but here’s one that was a high point for her—driving on the famed Alcan highway through Canada to Alaska.
“We only ran it four times in one winter—December, January, February. It was gorgeous. I was a little alert, shall we say, on the Alcan highway in the middle of nowhere, driving five hours without a light to be seen anywhere, and the highway of course was white because—I don’t even know if it was paved. I never saw it without snow.
One night (while Ed was asleep) I was being cautious—stay on the road, you can’t get off to the side. I saw a light coming up behind me. And it continued. I finally slowed down and waited—I figured ‘let him pass me.’ I stopped and looked out the window, and it was the aurora borealis, not a vehicle. The lights were that bright. Oh, was it beautiful! I can’t imagine anyone having any other kind of job if they like natural beauty.”
That trek to Alaska occurred while Kathy and Ed were working for Boyle Transportation.
If you look Boyle up on the internet, you’ll see they are a small (some 200 employees) but specialized trucking company—with high value cargoes for the American military and pharmaceutical companies, to take two areas.
As Andrew Boyle told us: “Our defense work we cannot broadcast. I can say that generally speaking, our business is engaged in the transport of critical material and lifesaving medicine. What’s neat about our company is that all of our people have a sense of purpose and mission in their work.”
Suffice it to say that driving highly classified loads of Defense Department equipment over snow covered roads to bases in Alaska is not for the faint of heart.
Where are women in trucking now?
There’s a shortage of truck drivers today, and recruiting men and women for the job is a critical and full-time effort.
As Boyle noted:
“About 90% of our operation is team driving.
Right now in our company 40% of our drivers are women.
There are spousal teams. And there are teammates. Two women and two men teams.
One of the great things about our industry is that if someone is skilled, responsible, and safe, they can earn a great living regardless of their location, ethnicity, race or gender. Nearly eight million Americans work in the trucking industry, and most of those jobs are blue collar jobs that don’t require a college education.”
Kathy, whether she acknowledges it or not, has had an impact on her industry and has been a guiding light for women.
As Boyle told us:
“Based on input from some of our great female professional drivers like Kathy, we tried to spec the equipment differently with some accommodations and extra steps, telescopic steering field, ultimately those became standards in today’s vehicles.
“In the past 10 years there’s been a great effort to drive more accommodation and growth of female drivers, including the American Trucking Associations Women in Motion program, plus Women in Trucking. Our director of recruiting is a female who used to be a professional driver and served on the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Women in Trucking advisory board for the past two years.”
So that’s the kind of growth Kathy Dyson sparked. Today women drivers are a key component of the industry, and their numbers continue to grow.
If there were to be an equivalent of a Truckers Hall of Fame as there is for baseball, Kathy would be in it.
I hope this column prompts someone somewhere to start one.
I hereby nominate Kathy as one of the first inductees.
And I hope they’ll do it in Women’s History Month!
Dick Hubert, a retired television news producer-writer-reporter living in Rye Brook, has been honored with the Peabody Award, the DuPont Columbia Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Journalism Award.
Editor’s Note: This column, written by Dick Hubert, represents his opinion and not that of this newspaper.
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