Wayne's Real World - by Peter Carter
10/16/2006

Between the time I started working at this magazine a few years back and today, I've become a far more interesting guy to drive down the highway with.
For one thing, the other people in whatever vehicle I'm piloting get full-length, in-depth feature tales about the various fleets of trucks that we pass.

"Hey look," I might announce when I see that familiar TransForce swoosh. "Did I ever tell you that the biggest truck company in this country started with a man delivering cheese on a bicycle?" It's true. Fifty-two years ago this month, the Saputo family started making and delivering cheese and eventually went on to hugeness.

I also have quite a few trucker tales that I gather from interviewing people across Canada.

Recently, in fact, I was telling my family and a neighbor/ passenger about a fellow I met who hauled fish guts from a processing plant on Vancouver Island to a waste site on the mainland.

But just before I got to the part about how the vast majority of his run was spent sitting on the ferry from Nanaimo to Horseshoe Bay, I noticed that the truck we were passing at that moment was from a place called Cardigan, P.E.I.

"Cardigan!" I said, "I know somebody from Cardigan."

Well, rather, I don't really know them. But I'd like to. And here's why. A couple of weeks back, I took a phone call at work. It was from a Cardigan-based hauler named George Van Denbroek. He wanted to know if I could mail a few copies of Today's Trucking to his friend Wayne Johnston.

Wayne's a trucker too, and a long-time pal of just about everybody involved in trucking on P.E.I., it seems. This past year, he was felled by ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease.

So Wayne, in his mid-50s, has been forced to hang up the keys. Not that he wants to. In fact he still likes to visit his old gear-jammin' grounds and see how his colleagues are doing and offer observations such as whether enough of them are driving Kenworths. (His personal favorite.)

But ALS is a unforgiving illness -- you wouldn't curse your worst enemy with it. He can still drive a car, but sometimes it's easier if one of the family chauffeurs him around. "Not working is killing Wayne as much as anything," George told me. "He's just as fine a man as you'd ever meet."

Wayne and his wife Thelma have three daughters, Tammy, Jill and Paula, as well as four grandkids and a dog, Jack.

With ALS sidelining him, Wayne's fellow truckers and friends figured money might get a bit tight, so they organized a benefit concert.

Wayne's friend Tracy Maclean, whose husband Kevin still drives at Kings County Construction, where Wayne put in 26 years, estimates that more than 800 people showed up at Cardigan Consolidated School for the event. A whole bunch of local musicians performed and and the organizers -- comprised primarily of folks from the trucking business -- raised about $12,000.

Not bad, eh?

George said that the important thing wasn't the money so much as it was the recognition "that this is one fine man."

By the way, I didn't interview Wayne for this story. It'll be a bit of a surprise for him, just like the benefit concert was.

I hope he's okay with the fact that we snuck around behind his back to get this picture and the facts about the situation. I did it for two reasons.

One was to get word out to anybody else who might know Wayne but didn't have a chance to attend the benefit. (George Van Denbroek at 902/583-3152, would be thrilled to pass along any donations.)

The second? To remind everybody else that Canadian trucking teems with community-minded leaders. Some have huge companies and industry associations to run. In that category, I'm thinking of the late John Cyopeck, who headed up the Canadian Trucking Alliance and Canpar Transport. He raised more than a million bucks for a new MRI machine months before he died this past April.

Then you have others -- good hard-working down-to-red-PEI-earth folks like Wayne Johnston, George Van Denbroek and Tracy Maclean, and everybody else who helps out around Cardigan. And that thing I mentioned earlier about me being a far more interesting person? I take it back. It's not me that's interesting.

It's the people in this business.


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