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Get more information about the commercial truck-driving course at Georgia Northwestern can at GNTC.edu.
Veronica Longwith was 44 when she first started driving 18-wheelers in 1987. She spent five years hauling carpet and flooring from Dalton, Ga., to terminals across the United States for Reeves Transportation.
Now - at age 73 - she's back in the cab.
The spunky, fiercely independent mother of two, grandmother of four and great-grandmother of one decided at the first of this year to renew her license to drive 18-wheelers.
"My son thinks I'm nuts," she laughs, "but it's a wonderful way to make a living."
Twenty-four years after the end of her first driving stint, the Summerville, Ga., resident enrolled in the 10-week commercial truck-driving course at Georgia Northwestern Technical College. Since passing that course, she's been hired by TransAm Trucking of Olathe, Kan. She starts her orientation with that company on Wednesday in Kansas City, Mo.
Originally from Brooklyn, N.Y., Longwith is the daughter of a military family and was constantly moving around the country as a child.
"My father was in the Navy and my stepdad was in Army Intelligence. My mother had a thing for uniforms," she chuckles. "I can remember asking my stepdad in ninth grade if there was any way I could spend more than one year at a school."
But those frequent moves proved a good foundation for the resilience of a trucker's life on the road.
"When I drove before, I would be out on the road three or four months at a time," she recalls. "I tell people there are two reasons why I love driving. First: You're not a guy, you're not a girl, you're a driver. There's a sense of equality among drivers that you can't get anywhere else. Don't try to pull the 'girl card.' It won't work.
"Second, I think our country is gorgeous. I saw wonderful things out West. One of the most beautiful things I ever saw was in Wyoming State troopers had put up a roadblock for a migration of pronghorn antelope. They crossed right in front of my truck; they weren't a bit afraid. I lost count at 400. I was overcome by the beauty of it."
Longwith came off the road in 1992 to care for her seriously ill brother. After his death, she operated a couple of her own businesses before deciding to enroll in Georgia Northwestern's commercial truck-driving course. The trucker says sitting out the rest of life in her Summerville retirement community just wasn't an option.
"The favorite hobby of the inmates here is getting disability," she jokes. "They have taken great pains to try to get me to stop and just sit - they're sharing names of their attorneys - but I have no intention of living the rest of life here."
She enrolled at Georgia Northwestern without telling her children, and managed to keep the course a secret until her son happened to see her turning onto the school's campus one morning.
The silver-haired senior adult was 50 years older than the rest of her classmates and the only long-haul trucker. Robert Browder, program director for the Georgia Northwestern commercial truck-driving course, says Longwith is only the second student age 70 or older he's had in 10 years of leading the course.
"It's not very often I have senior adults come in, and when I do their ages are usually late 50s-early 60s," he says. "She was a very good student.
"One thing I enjoyed was her attitude. It seemed like she always came in with a joke in the morning to help lighten the mood with some of the younger students, who were nervous all the time. She had a good personality," Browder says.
The instructor also liked that, during lectures, when a subject came up that Longwith could add a suggestion from personal experience "she would raise her hand and say, 'This is what happened to me when I was out there.' I like giving them examples of reality, not just what we are reading in the book - and she could give some good ones."
Longwith says she attended college on a HOPE scholarship, had to pay $50 for miscellaneous fees and $55 for her truck-driving test, she says. She also had to pass a doctor's physical before being hired and provide a permanent address, in this case, her sister's in Knoxville.
Longwith discovered a lot of changes since she was last behind the wheel - satellite communication, the addition of power steering, regulations on how long a driver can be on the road at one time. Still, she says she has no second thoughts about being a senior adult on the road, even though her son told her he was "officially against it."
"I just asked, 'When did it change that you're the parent and I have to ask permission like a child?'" she laughs.
Contact Susan Pierce at spierce@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6284.