Pub. 1 2020 Issue 2

Kentucky Trucker 23 KyTrucking.net W hen Roger Waddle got into the trucking industry, his timing was good. Trucking had been a regulated industry since 1935, when trucking was first put under the control of the ICC. For decades, the trucking industry had been forced to deal with laws that made it harder to compete with the declining railroad industry and also made it hard for any new trucking companies to get into the busi- ness or even make major changes to their business. Carriers were exempt from antitrust laws, despite a veto from President Truman, from 1948 on. The result was an inefficient industry with shipping charges that were 75% higher than in countries that didn’t regulate the industry. Much of that ended in 1980 with the Motor Carrier Act, which partially decontrolled trucking. Attitudes at the ICC were also more liberal than had been the case in the past. The result was greater efficiency, more competition and lower rates. Roger was originally hired as a part-time mechanic for Super Service Transportation in 1980 by the company’s president, Harris (Happy) Rakestraw. The company grew during the 1980s and 1990s and was one of the top 100 trucking companies in the U.S. In 1999, when Happy was ready to retire, he asked Roger to take over his job. The company was running 800 trucks at the time. At about the same time, Harvey Gainey at Gainey Trans- portation was buying trucking companies. Harvey bought Super Service. He also bought Lester Coggins Trucking. All three companies operated independently, which now had 2500 trucks on the road, and Roger stayed on as president. Gainey Transportation filed for bankruptcy in 2008, and Wayzata Investments bought Super Service Transporta- tion in 2009. Wayzata Investments consisted of some Har- vard graduates with a $6 billion portfolio. Their interest was in generating money more than running the business, which was not good. Roger became the COO but left the company in 2013. His departure may have sped up the decline of Super Service, but he didn’t enjoy working for such a large company. He stayed out of the industry until his two-year noncompete clause had expired. Roger had been working in the industry for more than 30 years by the time he left Super Service, and he could have happily retired, but he wanted to provide jobs for the people he’d worked with. Some of those relationships went back to his school days. For example, he was friends with two sisters who went to high school with him, Ruth Skaggs and Bobbie Hawk, and the three of them had worked together to build Super Service. He knew their jobs were falling apart along with the company he had left. In October 2015, he bought five trucks and started Hidden Creek Transportation. He named the company after the place where he currently lives. J&R Shugel bought what little was left of Super Service toward the end of 2019. Hidden Creek Transportation is intentionally much smaller than Super Service, but it is still growing quickly, and Roger enjoys coming to work every day.