operations. Kilthau’s daughter Heidi Pszanka is the company’s office manager and Brenda Spath is the billing clerk. It takes a good crew to make you successful and he feels he has a very capable group of employees and polished drivers on his team. You can make a solid plan in dispatching but your driver is the one who is out there, making the one on one with the customer and public, the one who is representing you. While Kilthau, 65, is in charge of the
company, he also still gets behind the wheel from time to time. In fact, he had made a short haul of molasses the day before Nebraska Trucker interviewed him. He especially enjoys hauling fuel because he can rise early and avoid the lines—usually for a run to North Platte, Neb., three hours away. “For me it’s a selfish thing because if I get
up at 3 o’clock and get down to the pipeline, get loaded and bring a load back to this area, then I get to spend the rest of the day doing my real job being the boss,” he said. “Tat’s why I enjoy it because it’s something that you know what you need to do, you go do it, get it done, and then you’ve got the rest of the day to keep the company in tune.” To this day, he still practices the good habits
he developed as an owner-operator, such as walking around and looking for hazards before deciding where to park in an unfamiliar place. “Tere’s a sense of fulfillment,” he said. “It’s
like I tell our drivers: It’s not how fast you get the load done. It’s how well you do it. If you can keep doing a load over and over, never have any tire trouble, don’t have any accidents, every day when you do that and do it in a good way, it’s fulfilling and rewarding. …Tat’s my goal is to always see how many trips you can make before you have a flat tire. Stay on the road. Stay out of places you don’t belong.” Kilthau was raised on a family farm in
Minatare, the son of parents Henry and Mary, with two siblings, Larry and Evelyn, who were much older. “My dad called me the caboose,” he said. Te family raised many of the same crops
Kilthau later would raise as an adult. Te experiences introduced him to work at an early age. “When I was about five years old, I started running a tractor, if you can believe that,” he
Omaha On-Highway 10710 I St.
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said. “So I used to wear gray coveralls when I was little, and we had a Ford tractor that was gray. And so my dad had me out rotary hoeing a cornfield, and the neighbor (at) the adjacent farm, he came driving over to my dad and caught him and he goes, ‘Henry, how can you get that tractor to go up and down the field by itself?’” Te Kilthaus stayed on the farm until
Henry suffered a heart attack when Kilthau was a high school senior, and then they moved to town for a couple of years. As an adult, Kilthau married, and began work at Kansas
Nebraska Natural Gas Company before he returned to farming. Kilthau sees the parallels in farming and
trucking. Both are risky ventures affected by the weather. Moreover, he learned skills in farming that translate to trucking. For example, harvesting sugar beets is similar to parking a semi. “Te two go hand in hand because if you’ve
operated big machinery, it’s kind of like driving a truck, and there are certain things that you
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