Idea Man, R.I.P.

Truckers News Senior Editor Todd Dills is the author of a novel, Sons of the Rapture, and blogs daily at www.overdriveonline.com/channel19. Write him at tdills@rrpub.com or http://twitter.com/channel19todd.

Tuesday, Feb. 16, YRC road driver Steve Forsman got a call from fellow hauler Karl Krueger, who’d been waylaid in a motel in Sioux City, Iowa, for a day and a half after snowstorms shut down I-29.

“He was having a breakfast at the truckstop,” Forsman says, “and he was bragging a little about how good it was.” Operating out of the same Sioux Falls, S.D., terminal, Forsman and Krueger were frequent breakfast companions.

Krueger said the roads were wet but otherwise passable and set off south. It was the last time Forsman talked to his friend. Later that morning near Missouri Valley, Iowa, Krueger’s tractor, pulling doubles, crashed into the rear of a line of four semis stopped in traffic on I-29 for unclear reasons, according to the Iowa State Patrol’s crash report — a more in-depth report was forthcoming at press time. Krueger, 62, was commemorated at a service attended by more than 400 people in his native Sparta, Wis., the following Monday.

“He was a very good driver,” Forsman says of his friend. “I drove behind him many a night going to Chicago and Kansas City. It’s hard to believe that all this happened.”

Krueger was a long-shot candidate in the 2008 presidential race with a platform of eliminating America’s use of foreign oil and pushing alternative fuels to the forefront of American transport. He encouraged single donors, limiting contributions to $50 maximum.

If that sounds familiar in retrospect, Karl’s brother Steve, a hotshot owner-operator just 14 months Karl’s junior, says Karl was “way ahead of many,” particularly in the political realm. When he first began running for local political office in the late 1970s, after 13 years of service in the army, he was already trumpeting the need for an ethanol plant near Sparta, Wis., Steve says, near which the Kruegers were reared. “Here just a year ago or so, they had a big battle over just such a plant and voted it down.”