“If you ever got home, you sat down with two pots of coffee and a logbook, filled everything out and made it all fit.” “At that time, with paper logs and fuel that was 18 cents a gallon, what you did was mashed on it and drove as fast as you could and got all the miles that you could,” Low admitted. I had this attraction to truckers and packers and that kind of thing, so I gravitated that way almost accidentally.”Īs a one-truck operation, Low, like many others at that time, ran hard and fast with little regard for the law. “It was circumstances, a confluence of events. “It was an accident,” he said of the launch of his trucking career. Low traded in his dump truck for a highway tractor and began calling on his contacts in the meat business looking for stuff to haul.

“I don’t know if anyone was going to want to drive across a bridge I built, so I started thinking about other things I could do.” “Those courses started getting pretty hard,” Low chuckled. Meanwhile, post-secondary education was proving to be a grind and Low’s engineering aspirations were cast in doubt.

“That went south in a hurry,” he recalled of the experience with his very first company driver. He hired a driver for it when he went back to school. Low’s first rig was a previously owned dump truck he bought while in college and then drove during the summer. His father was a market news reporter and many of Low’s friends were in the meat business. Low grew up on a Missouri farm raising cattle, hogs and chickens. The fact it exists at all is remarkable, given the turmoil the company faced in its formative years. runs more than 5,000 tractors and some 7,000 trailers as a leader in the refrigerated and flatdeck freight transportation segments. Low was interviewed by Truck News editorial director Lou Smyrlis as part of the seminar’s popular How They Did It series. With his quick wit and self-deprecating sense of humour, Low had the audience at the most recent Driving for Profit seminar hanging by his every word as he recounted the tumultuous early years in Prime’s colourful history. is probably best told by its founder and CEO Robert Low. – From the highest highs to the lowest lows and then back again, the eventful history of Prime Inc.

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