A truck with family ties

Driver's kin collaborate to get his big rig made over by TV show

A year ago, Jay Whiteford's 1997 Freightliner was nothing fancy. The breakdown-prone white truck had a partial coat of gray primer and more than 1.2 million miles on it.

But these days, the truck has become a sleek machine that awestruck drivers can't stop gushing about.

Whiteford, a Smithfield resident, and his newly tricked-out truck are the latest stars of the popular cable TV series "Trick My Truck," which airs at 10 p.m. today on CMT, the Country Music Television network. The show features big-rig truck mechanics who "steal" truck drivers' rigs and customize them to their wildest dreams.

Whiteford, 47, has been a ritual watcher of the series since it began in 2006. He digs the principle behind the show, he said, which is helping drivers who are having a hard time.

The show gets tens of thousands of applications each year, and producers interviewed about 400 candidates on-camera in Joplin, Mo. before narrowing the field to 10 this season, said CMT spokeswoman Amanda Murphy. Whiteford recalls the excitement he felt when he learned he had been selected.

"I liked to have wet my britches," he said. "Here ... freight's tough to get, fuel's killing you, you have kids to put through school, tires to buy. If you got a call like this, it would blow your mind."

From a young age as he was growing up in Greenville, Whiteford was interested in trucking. A friend's father would let Whiteford and his buddy wash the father's truck on weekends and then drive them around the block. That fueled Whiteford's fire for trucking.

"We never could talk him out of it," said his mother, Lynn Whiteford, 80, a former admissions officer at East Carolina University.

She and her husband sent their son to trucking school in Greensboro after he graduated from high school. He drove for various companies for about a decade, carrying all sorts of freight.

"Anything from nitroglycerin to Pampers," Jay Whiteford said. "I have hauled just about everything."

In 1992, Whiteford decided he needed his own rig. His parents took out a lien on their house to help him buy his first truck.

In more recent years, Lynn Whiteford knew her son kept putting off a paint job on his latest truck because other repairs were more pressing. So after her son told her about the show, she secretly nominated him with supporting letters from his wife, daughter and a close family friend.

The makeover wizards of "Trick My Truck" strove to create a rolling tribute to the family ties and friendships that have buoyed Whiteford throughout his career. They gave his rig's exterior a $50,000 paint job with a chameleon base coat of purple, which changes to bronze, peach, brown and pink in the sun, and they emblazoned it with the words Deeply Rooted.

On the inside, they redid the truck's sleeping quarters and painted a family tree, charting five generations of Whiteford's family. A friend also got Daimler to donate a newly remanufactured Detroit Diesel engine.

The truck now runs more smoothly, Whiteford said, and gets better fuel economy, saving him about $175 a week.

But celebrity isn't always easy.

Drivers flock to see his truck sometimes, delaying him a little at stops. On the road, too, the fans are many.

"Sometimes I turn my CB radio down just a little bit to give my voice a chance to rest," he said.

But Whiteford knows he's lucky. And despite such maladies as knee trouble, carpal tunnel syndrome and trigger finger, which makes fingers hard to open, Whiteford is proud to be a truck driver.

"Without trucks, America stops," he said.