Harold "Bud" Adrian entered World War II in earnest when he hit the beach with the 103rd Infantry Division at Marseille, France, in 1944. As a going-away present, the United States government sent him a truck in a box.
"We had to tear the crate apart and put all the wheels and cab and box on," says Adrian. He had never built a truck before, but he says it wasn't difficult. "They were mostly big pieces," he chuckles. He repositions a photo album so I can see a wartime photograph of him beside the assembled 2 1/2-ton truck. "She took right off. I drove that sucker all through the war and on into Innsbruck, Austria."
Today, at 76, Bud Adrian is still driving. While he takes me through albums filled with old pictures of young men at war, his 1995 Kenworth Aerodyne is parked just outside. We are at the kitchen table of the modest house he shares with his wife near Chippewa Falls, Wis. The house nestles in a secluded grove of white pines overlooking a wooded lake. The couple has lived here for 55 years -- they have two grandchildren and a son who drives OTR -- and a wall near the kitchen is filled with driving awards and pictures of several of the rigs Adrian has run since he first climbed in a cab 62 years ago.
Bud Adrian ran away from home at the age of 14, and took a job driving trucks for a harvest crew in Minnesota. At 15, he lied about his age to get a trucking job with the Civilian Conservation Corps. By the time he was called up in 1942, he was barely 20 and newly married. He and his wife were working for the same trucking company -- she as a dispatcher and bookkeeper, and he as a driver, hauling down and dying livestock in 2-ton Chevrolets and Fords.
Two days after he got home from the war, he was driving again, locally. Then he started making West Coast runs in a 170-horse cabover. Twenty-two years ago, he wound up with DART Transit, where he recently drove his 3-millionth safe mile. Adrian has been shifting gears for over sixty years, and if he cherishes those safe miles, it's because he learned a thing or two about unsafe miles from the unforgiving canvas seat of an olive-green deuce-and-a-half.
"In Mannheim, Germany, I was going down the street and this plane was comin' right at me with the cannons and the machine guns goin', just tearin' up them old cobblestones, and I bailed out of the truck down a side street just to get the buildings between us."
He left his rifle behind in an upright scabbard beside his seat, and when he climbed back in the truck, he found his wedding ring hanging on the bayonet stud. In his haste to exit, the ring had snagged and been skinned from his finger. "I hadn't even noticed," he chuckles. Then he makes a colossal understatement. "'Course, I was hepped up." And lucky. The fighter blasted the street right to Adrian's bumper, and then apparently ran out of ammunition. "He didn't put a scratch on the truck," says Adrian, shaking his head.
"They were six-cylinder GMCs," says Adrian. "You had a five-speed with a two-speed, but when you used the two-speed to shift it down, it automatically put the front wheels in. In other words, you had six-wheel drive when you were in low range. They were fun if you hit somethin' with the front wheel drive in and you had your thumb stuck in the steerin' wheel -- you lost your thumb, because the power on there would just flip that wheel around.
"We hauled supplies and kitchens, and we'd haul the troops when they'd make a big move. When we moved them 60 miles, then we had to go back and bring up the ammo, then the kitchens, and then we went back and got the duffel bags and things like that. So when they went 60 miles, we had to make about 400 to catch up. You never slept. When you stopped you fell over in the seat and slept until the convoy moved again."
Through it all, Adrian saw the worst the war had to offer, from sustained combat -- "we got strafed all the time" -- to the liberation of concentration camps -- "we made the civilians carry out bodies" -- but like so many matter-of-fact men of his type, he has a knack for turning a terrifying tale into a joke on himself.
"One time I got lost and ran right down through a tank battle -- Germans on one side and Americans on the other," says Adrian. He grins. "When I came out of there, I guess you know that ol' deuce-and-a-half was flyin'!
"Another time, we went on a task force to pick up troops and they sent us in a big circle. When we were done, they turned us loose to go back -- but they didn't tell us there were 200,000 Germans in that circle. We got a map off a railroad station and just started following it. Well, we came into this town, and I thought I saw a lot of Germans with guns on their shoulders, but I wasn't payin' much attention.
"All of a sudden a good lookin' French gal came runnin' out in the street, she was a-garglin' away in French. I said 'talk German, I can't understand French.' So she told me in German we were the first Americans she'd ever seen, that these were all German soldiers and there was a Panzer division one kilometer down the road.
"I guess you know I didn't wait for her to finish -- the guy behind me made a U-turn, and we headed back in one hell of a hurry! When we got back to our lines we got stopped by our own guards -- here we went through our lines and never knew it."
He chuckles again, and shakes his head at his luck, but then he speaks again, more softly. "But some of the guys went right down through, and ran into roadblocks. They got killed, wiped right off their trucks." He smooths the plastic over a row of pictures, here and there touching a face that never grew old.
From Nov. 11, 1944 until May 4, 1945, the 103rd ground its way deep into Europe. "We fought up through the Vosges mountains of France, then we fought on through into Germany and on down across Germany into Austria," says Adrian.
"And on the last day of the war, we ended up there at Brenner Pass, on the Austrian-Italian border. We came down off the mountain in first gear, ridin' the brakes -- we'd all picked up trailers in France, big four-wheel trailers, and we had them loaded with ammo, probably 10-15 tons pushing us, and just hydraulic brakes on the truck -- you had to have her right down in first gear and she just screamed comin' down that mountain."
In a happy twist of fate, when Adrian's division drew to a halt, ready to celebrate the end of the war, they found themselves in front of a warehouse filled with vermouth and dry gin. "10,000 quarts, we found," says Adrian. A celebration followed, and, says Adrian, "I ain't never been able to look at dry gin since."
Adrian spent time after the victory hauling German soldiers back to their homes. "I had this one I'll never forget," he says. "He was the last one on the truck. I took him right to his house, way up in northern Germany, and his folks met us at the door.
"They were so surprised -- they hadn't heard or seen anything of him for two or three years, and here I am bringing him home alive.
"Well, they just fed me up something terrible that night. I slept there overnight and then the next morning I went clear back down across into Austria again, back to Innsbruck."
And with that, Adrian pushes back from the table. His Kenworth is waiting. "I need to make 600 miles tonight and tomorrow morning," he says.
The pictures on the kitchen table and the pictures on the wall tell the story: For six decades, in peace and in war, Bud Adrian has never felt at home without a steering wheel in his hand.
