Husband-wife team Chris and Ruth Smith didn’t take the most traditional path to becoming owner-operators, today leased to aviation engine-hauling Southern Pride Trucking, but their unconventional path has led them to success.
Chris started driving a truck in the United Kingdom in 1987 after a stint in the U.S. Army. His family is from the UK originally, and he spent his early childhood there before his parents moved him and his sister, Beverly, to California in the 1960s when Chris was 6.
Chris Smith is shown here with a DAF cabover he drove during his time in the late '80s and early '90s driving in the UK, Europe and the Middle East.
In those early years of his driving career, Chris “went back and forth from the UK to the U.S. because my parents were living over here [in the U.S.], so I sort of always missed them,” he said.
Chris met Ruth, who is from England, during one of his stints in the UK. “I was working for a feed merchant with a public weighbridge,” the term used for scales across the pond, Ruth said. “He came in, and we met when I was working there.”
The couple got married in 1997. Just a few months into their marriage, “there was a change in our situation,” Ruth said. Namely, Chris lost his truck driving job on Christmas Eve. The company he was driving for at the time had a shirt-and-tie policy for operators. Someone Chris worked with reported him for not wearing a tie.
“I showed up to pick him up from work” on Christmas Eve, Ruth said, and “I had the turkey sitting on the backseat my company had given me as a Christmas gift.” When Chris got in the car, he let her know the news. “Oh great. Thanks a lot. Merry Christmas,” she joked.
