Back to School

When Gary Ninivirta takes to the road, he’s always got 120 or so people riding shotgun. One other adult and about 119 kids. They get along pretty well.

From Thunder Bay, Ont., this truck driver is a man of the old school. Of Finnish descent, he travels the continent pulling freight this way and that, on the road for three and four months at a time. But he’s never far from a bunch of kids at Chippewa Falls Middle School in Wisconsin.

Those 120 eighth-graders and their teacher, Gregg Jochimsen, call themselves “Underdog and the Roadrangers” while they call their Canadian friend “The Viking.” And when I say Ninivirta is never far from them, I mean it. The cab of his truck is full of drawings and gifts and mementoes given to him by those grateful kids. And he shows them off with such pride that you’d think they were his own children.

A lively, friendly guy who loves to talk, he’s their Trucker Buddy, one of some 4,000 drivers around the world who link up with classrooms, mostly in the U.S. They share news about their travels and thus enhance the school curriculum in reading, writing, geography, social studies, history, and even math. And in many cases, like this one, they form real relationships.

There’s more than a little irony in this for Ninivirta, because he never went beyond grade 8 himself. Before hooking up with his Roadrangers in Wisconsin, he says he’d never written a letter in his life, hadn’t been to a library in years, and never once as a kid.

“Now I’m learning as much as the kids are,” he says with a wide grin, “and that includes spelling.”

He’s also spending time in libraries as he bones up on the lessons “his” students are doing, learning what to tell them about places he’s been and things he’s seen. In fact he hauls a small library around in the truck with him nowadays.

“For somebody who’s working for a living, I’m having way too much fun,” he says. And he means it.

For this interview we met at a Toronto cardlock, and Ninivirta was keen to show me things like a huge map of North America that the kids had drawn, plotting his travels through this state and that province. But it was a windy day and we needed the help of another driver, a stranger who couldn’t quite figure out what was going on, just to hold the map steady across the grille of his Volvo while I snapped a picture. It wasn’t your normal truckstop scene.

Ninivirta is a 35-year veteran of the road, a company driver for Winnipeg Moving & Storage, an Allied Van Lines agent run by the Krulicki family, though he hauls mostly general freight. Last year, he was named Trucker Buddy of the Month, a hero in the eyes of those school kids, because he goes the extra mile and then some.

Ninivirta proudly shows off drawings given to
him by eighth grade ‘Roadrangers.’

He’s visited the classroom four times and keeps in touch weekly by phone and postcard. Those postcards help the kids with geography, of course, and also connect them with the history of places all over the continent. He’s given each student a CB handle, and at Christmas he sends gifts.

He comes by this generous spirit honestly. He says his folks were ‘Block Parents’ before that phrase and that role officially existed.

“Dad and Mom were forever taking in kids and other lost souls and supporting them while they got themselves together,” he says. “Dad protected those kids like they were his own.”

Married to Sue for 31 years with grown kids of his own, Ninivirta’s early years were spent largely on or at least near his grandparents’ farm in Alma, Man., and he attended a one-room school in Falcon Lake.

The trucking bug first got him there on the farm, but it struck again when an Allied moving van hauled him and his family from there to Thunder Bay. But the job was really started and finished by his father, a tough and resourceful guy who was a farmer, a forest-fire fighter, and latterly a heavy-equipment operator and sometimes truck driver for the City of Thunder Bay.

“That’s when I really got the bug,” Ninivirta says. “Dad instilled toughness and self-sufficiency in me,” he adds. “He taught me everything.”

That self-sufficiency was evident early on, because by the time he was 14 Ninivirta was hitchhiking west on his own each April, often working at trucking outfits, just exploring the world. He’d come home in November for another glorious Thunder Bay winter. And he’s really never stopped those wandering ways.

He’s been around trucks and truck yards since 1972. Back then he just helped out at Gordon’s Cartage, doing odd jobs and occasionally going on local runs with real drivers, but eventually he was at the wheel himself.

At Henderson’s Cartage he became a full-time local driver, and there followed stints with the likes of Lakehead Freightways and Valley Paper, among others. He’s been with Winnipeg Moving & Storage for five years now, usually hauling into the U.S. Like his father, who died in 1994, Ninivirta has a spotless driving record.

But his real claim to fame is the impact he’s had on 120 kids in Wisconsin. Clearly they love him something fierce, and that was plainly evident this past July when he paid a visit to Chippewa Falls. Asleep in the bunk before he was due to meet Underdog and the Roadrangers, he was jarred awake by music very nearby. Turns out the school’s marching band was playing in his honor just outside the truck. And that was followed by a tailgate party for him, in which the whole school was involved.

“I was about this high off the ground,” he says, reaching for a point above his head. He’s still there.