COVER STORY


BY SAVING MONEY


MAKING MONEY


Ray and Peggy Jerrel made a living by avoiding expenses, debt


BY STEVE BRAWNER Contributing writer


By the time he had graduated high school


in 1949, Ray Jerrrel had saved enough money to buy two trucks: a 1937 Ford with a 16-foot box, and aGMC with a 24-foot trailer.He paid cash for both. “If you’re only making two or three percent


on what you’re doing and you’ve got to pay 6-8 percent interest, it don’t work very good, I never thought,” he said. “But that interest goes on 24 hours a day, you know.” Jerrel had saved enough money to buy


the trucks working odd jobs, such as selling newspapers.He didn’t even have a driver’s license when he bought the Ford, which he used for gravel, cows, hay, and “anything I could get to haul.”Growing up, two of his brothers had been truck drivers, and he planned on doing the same. “I kind of wanted to do it all my life,” he said. When Jerrel retired in 1995, Miles City-


based Ray Jerrel, Inc., was running 10 trucks, but at its peak it had 28. It hauled primarily feed and livestock. Most of his routes went through the Midwest, though he also traveled the country carrying lambs to New York, yearlings to Iowa, and sheep to South Dakota. While times changed, Jerrel’s values never


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did.He remained as frugal as ever.He once cut an old flat trailer in two and built the carrier’s first pot belly. During all those years, he borrowed


money to buy only one truck, a 1962 Peterbilt. Part of his thinking was that taking out loans required him to purchase comprehensive insurance. Instead, he carried only liability and cargo insurance and saved the difference. After one accident, he had to spend $86,000 repairing one truck and trailer with about 20,000 miles on the odometer. But overall, the numbers worked in his favor. “If you’ll take what your insurance costs


you, and you save it for three years and leave it alone, you’re ahead of the game unless you have a really bad wreck. ... The insurance companies are in business to make money. You know that,” he said. Jerrel and his high school sweetheart,


Peggy, married when he graduated high school and then built the business together. Money at times was tight in the early years. Jerrel spent the summer of 1953 as a welder on aWyoming oil field to make ends meet. One summer, they moved to Sidney and hauled fat cattle to St. Paul, Minn. “I don’t know any man that ever has


worked harder than Raymond has for the 64 years we’ve been married,” Peggy said.


ISSUE 3, 2013 | www.mttrucking.org But Peggy, like Jerrel, had grown up in


modest circumstances and was not expecting an easy life. “I lived in the country,” she said. “I rode horseback to school for eight years, and my mother had 10 children, and my dad died when there were six of us left, and the oldest one was a freshman in high school, and that was before Social Security. My mother babysat for a living, and I went to work when I was 13. Then my sisters behind me went to work. You know, we just made it, and when I married Raymond, we did the same thing.” Peggy managed the office throughout its


existence. For about 10 years, she also worked for a dentist, Dr. ArloNansel, and kept a phone in the back office for conducting trucking business between helping patients.When she was busy,Nansel would answer it for her. Jerrel hired his first driver in the early 1950s


and began growing the business. Finding those drivers could be difficult. They had to know how to load and unload, they had to be careful to ensure the animals weren’t injured in transit, and they had to be self-reliant on the road. A mechanical failure with live freight can be mighty inconvenient. “You’ve just got to have somebody that’s


smarter than the cow is all. ... Some of them don’t know which end the hay goes in,” Jerrel said.


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