with the instructor very well so I switched over to electronics.” After classes, from 3:00 to midnight or one


in the morning, he worked for Arrow Freight unloading and loading trucks, then go home and grab a few hours of sleep before rising early to drive to Hastings for more school. “Tose particular weeks I would weigh five


pounds more come Monday morning than I did Friday evening,” he said. “It was a lot of work and not a lot of sleep. It was a good time.” He eventually took over management of the


shop, then the parts department, as he got deeper into the nitty-gritty of the business. He was around in 1976 when Grand Island Express opened a brand new building – and he was around on June 3, 1980, when “Te Night of the Tornados” knocked it down. “Grand Island took seven tornados on the


ground that night. It was a pretty weird storm,” Pirnie recalled. “Te tornado affected us in a huge way. We were running about 35 trucks hauling swinging meat. I don’t think we even had fax machines then; we had to send a list to all of our shippers to a truck stop in Chicago with one of our outbound trucks. Te drivers, after they unloaded in Chicago, would go to the truck stop and start calling our shippers to find a backhaul.” Te headquarters had no phone service for two


weeks, so various office functions were moved into people’s garages. After looking around for another place to occupy, though, they decided they had to go back into their old home base. “Te office portion was still intact, though the


WASH – DRIVERS CAN PULL UP INTO THE WASH BAY AND GET THE ENTIRE TRACTOR AND TRAILER WASHED IN FIVE MINUTES.”


refrigerated trailers. James Pirnie passed away in 1982, after seven years of dialysis following kidney failure in 1975, and his son Tom bought Grand Island Express from his estate and has been running it since. Today Grand Island’s primary routes are from


Denver to the East Coast – New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts – as well as parts of Texas, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Michigan. “We haul the meat out and we haul a huge


variety of stuff coming back,” said Pirnie. “It might be foodstuffs for food distributors. It could be


14


cardboard boxes for manufacture. It could be beer – we haul a fair amount of beer, as well.” In short, if you like a good cookout with plenty


of beef and cold brews, add Grand Island to the list of folks you need to thank. Like a lot of folks in family-owned trucking


concerns, Pirnie got his first taste of the business as part-time help during high school. “I was working in the shop, washing parts,


going after parts and stuff, some small repairs,” he said. “Ten I went to community college. I started out taking diesel mechanics but I didn’t get along


“WE PUT IN A DRIVE-THROUGH TRUCK


roof and air conditioning had been sucked off,” said Pirnie. “We decided to reroof and paint the walls and replace the carpet and take out the ceiling tiles; we got all that accomplished in a week. Tree weeks after the tornado, we were back in business – running off a generator, we had our own well, we had facilities, lights, no air conditioning, and ran that way until we got rebuilt and power back.” Tat made them the first commercial building


to get back up and running after the tornados, and they were fully rebuilt by September. Using their existing foundations and sticking with the original floor plan, they made few alterations – but did install 16-foot doors instead of 14-footers, in order to accommodate hydraulic fifth-wheels and yard tractors some day. “Tat’s been a happy improvement since the


tornado; we use those all the time now,” he said. “It saves a couple of minutes every time we bring a trailer into the shop to work on it.” Today, Grand Island Express runs 101 company


units and 34 owner-operators. Pirnie says he strives to keep it very much a family business, one of his rules being “treat others like you’d like to be treated.” “We call people by their names,” he said. “When we have something to celebrate I’ll cook us lunch,


NEBRASKA TRUCKER — ISSUE 4, 2013 — www.nebtrucking.com


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