This month’s creation was built for Hoewing Trucking in Canton, MO for a deserving driver, Kevin Benson, who worked hard to earn it. Hoewing is a partnership of two brothers, Scott and Mark Hoewing, along with a group of great drivers. They currently run seven tractor-trailers and three dump trucks – five of them are Petes and five are Western Stars. Mark and Scott are 50/50 partners in the business, but Mark works for the US Army Corp of Engineers full-time and is a certified diver for them, as well. Trucking is Scott’s thing. He drives, dispatches and does the billing (everything but the payroll).
Mark is married to Cindy and they have three children – Bailey (21), Cole (19) and Brady (13). Scott is married to Tabitha and they have two children – Austin (23), who drives one of the Western Stars, and Sydnee (19), who is studying to be an accountant. When the boy’s parents, Wayne and Sharon Hoewing, split up in 1981, they moved to Canton, MO. Before that, the Hoewing family had been farmers since the 1800s in St. Patrick, MO, near the Mississippi River, and Scott vividly remembers the floods of 1973 and 1993, and having to evacuate and move everything to higher ground.
After graduating high school, Scott landed a job working construction, which he did for ten years. Shortly after the flood of 1993, his dad Wayne and a coworker at the Corp of Engineers started a new company called Hoewing-Winter General Contracting. Scott happily joined them as an equipment operator, and there was no shortage of work after the flood. Their first truck was an IHC gas-burner dump truck which was nice, but it just didn’t pull very well. Over the years they added trucks, but they were usually already old and worn out, and it seemed that for every twelve hours worked, it took six hours of repairs to get them ready for the next day.
Things were going good until their father, Wayne, was tragically murdered in 1997. The following year, the boys took their inheritance and paid off all the debts and changed the company name to Hoewing Trucking, LLC and never looked back. One of their drivers is a certified “truck nut” named Kevin Benson. Kevin (pictured) has worked for Scott for a total of about 15 years, having left a few times to “stretch his legs” but always coming back. Scott is a firm believer in hard work, saying, “If you work hard for what you want, you will go far,” so when it came time to get Kevin a new truck, they called me.
The new truck is a Cobalt blue 2019 Pete 389 with a 44” flattop and a Lime green frame, a modest wheelbase, and a slightly taller stance than Kevin’s previous rig (sometimes they need a little extra clearance). When you are in the 
aggregate business, every pound counts, so they chose a Paccar MX510 with a 13-speed and all the lightweight goodies (the truck had a tag weight of only 16,710 lbs. before accessories).
When the truck showed up, Billy and the boys in the body shop added a stainless drop visor, clear LED cab lights, extra grill bars and a custom boltless flip bumper with tow hook holes, just in case. They also painted the tanks and then installed Fisher fenders on hidden brackets, a smooth deck plate and an RLK tail box. Our fiberglass man Kevin modified Fibertech cab and sleeper skirts so we could add lights to the bottom, and then my dad chopped the breathers and built custom light panels. After dump valves were added to the steer axle, Tyler in the service department hid the DEF tank.
Scott let Kevin do what he wanted, feeling that his hard-work had earned it, saying, “Kevin will come in and polish his truck all weekend so when he goes back to work on Monday it looks good. That’s working hard for what you want, so why not reward him with a nice ride!” And a nice ride is what he got. Kevin Benson is living proof that hard work pays off.
