HERMON, Maine — Bruce Mason feasted on a plate of turkey, mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce at Dysart’s restaurant in Hermon around noon Thursday. He was far from his Presque Isle home, where his family was spending Thanksgiving day without him.
Mason is a truck driver for Pottle’s Transportation. A faded baseball cap covers his gray hair, and he wears wire-rimmed glasses. He has been a trucker for 38 years and says getting home late for the holidays — or missing them entirely — can still be tough.
Lucky for him, he has two families, and he always gets to spend Turkey Day with at least one of them.
“You meet up [for a meal] with your buddy, another trucker, and you converse with them,” he said. “It’s like two families. You’ve got your trucker family and your family at home.”
There are more than three million truck drivers in the United States, according to the American Trucking Associations, the industry’s largest trade group. That’s still not enough to meet the demands of the industry, according to an October news release from the ATA.
Turnover in the industry is at its highest point in two years, according to the ATA. The group’s chief economist said the shortage of drivers is “as bad as ever and is expected to get worse in the near term.”
Trucking experts say one reason the industry is having trouble attracting qualified drivers is the long hours spent on the road. Federal law limits drivers to 11 hours of driving for each 14 hours of work, and many truckers regularly meet the limit. Plus, the demands of the nation’s 24/7 economy mean drivers often spend their holidays on the road, rather than at home with their families.
Enter Dysart’s, the landmark restaurant and truck stop has been serving Thanksgiving dinners to truckers since it first opened in 1967.
A shifting of tradition
Mary Dysart Hartt, who co-runs the business with her brothers Ed and Tim Dysart, said she worked the first Thanksgiving at the restaurant that year, when she was just 12 years old. Since then, she said, the restaurant has grown, and now more families come to eat on the holidays than truckers do.
“We were primarily a truck stop then, and only had 70 seats in those days,” she said during a recent interview. “Now we have 220 seats. We expect far more people — lots of people.”
Ken Kelly, a trucker from Mars Hill who works for J&C Transport in South Dakota, was enjoying the meal with his friend, Harold Daigle of Cross Lake. Kelly said the reason fewer truckers share Thanksgiving together is because of changes in the industry.
“We all used to eat in restaurants years ago, but now we’ve got refrigerators and microwaves right in the trucks,” he said. More and more drivers are simply heating up “junk food,” he said, and eating alone in their cabs.
Culture changing
It’s not just changes to the trucks. It’s also changes to the culture of drivers.
On Thanksgiving Day, young truckers were few and far between at Dysart’s. The new generation of drivers is less willing to work long hours away from home, Kelly said, and are less connected to one another than truckers were in the past. That’s because it’s easier to keep in constant contact with friends and families now than it was decades ago.
“We grew up on CB radio. Now they’ve all got social media and computers and phones,” Kelly said.
Still welcoming drivers
While the family dining crowd may have grown, Dysart’s continues to welcome drivers for a hot meal of stuffed turkey and all the fixings. Seconds on side dishes are even free — just like they would be at home.
Jessica Hall was serving families around lunchtime on Thanksgiving but said she would go back to her usual shift on the “truckers only” table for dinner. Her nametag said she’d been a waitress at Dysart’s for 12 years. She said it was important for the drivers to have a place to congregate for the holidays, even if there aren’t as many at the tables as there used to be.
“A lot of them only see their families on the weekends or even once a month,” she said. “We’re family to them, and they’re family to us.”
Jake Harvey has been driving trucks for 10 years and drives for Vallencourt Transportation in Van Buren. He said usually leaves home Sundays and doesn’t get back until Friday. He stopped at Dysart’s for lunch Thursday, on his way home to Fort Kent from New Jersey.
As for the Thanksgiving dinner tradition at the restaurant, “it’s huge,” he said.
“It’s a little piece of home. This is a regular thing for a lot of us on the road,” he said. “I’ve had Thanksgiving here a lot.”
Maybe because he had earned the right to break from tradition after so many turkey days at the truckstop, there was no bird on the menu for Harvey. He ordered bourbon steak tips.
Follow Mario Moretto on Twitter at @riocarmine.
