HOLMFIELD, Man. – When John Wolf puts on a welding helmet, he does it in the relaxed manner of a man putting on a favourite baseball cap.
Which isn’t surprising, considering the 63-year-old has been welding since he was eight.
As a child, he virtually lived inside his father’s blacksmithing and machine shop at a Mennonite village near Cuauhtémoc, Mexico.
“I would get up at five o’clock in the morning, my dad was in the shop and that’s where I would go. My mom would have to come and get me out of there, to clean up and go to school,” said John, who still gets out of bed at 4:30 every morning.
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Although he no longer starts welding at that early hour, John continues to weld and work in his son Peter’s machine shop. The two live on adjacent properties with their families east of Killarney, Man., and operate a 900 acre grain farm.
When they’re not managing the farm, the father and son team are in the shop, converting used transport trucks into grain and gravel trucks.
“Both of us have always enjoyed working on trucks,” said Peter.
They have built 10 trucks since they started J & P Wolf Trucks in 2007.
The move into truck conversions was a natural fit for Peter and John, because they ran their own transport company for 22 years, hauling flax bales to processing plants in Winkler and Elm Creek in south-central Manitoba.
Peter sold his 12 kilogram dairy quota in 2007 and needed something to do when he wasn’t grain farming. For John, working with his hands and keeping busy is an essential component of his DNA.
Sitting down for a moment inside a shop big enough to house two trucks, John pointed to a 1946 John Deere Model A parked in a corner.
He said that his father left Winkler in 1921 and moved, at the age of eight, with his family to northern Mexico. The vast majority of Mennonite farmers who settled there used John Deere tractors, typically Model A, Model B or the 830. By the time he was eight, John was taking apart the tractors at his father’s repair shop.
“I would strip them all down and get everything ready,” said John, who learned how to reassemble the engines before he was a teenager.
The time spent using tools enhanced John’s mechanical ability but didn’t amplify his interest in school. He dropped out when he was 12 and admitted he cannot read or write.
“I was too smart for school … (but) I wish I had been dumber then, (because) then I would be smarter now,” he said with a laugh.
John became a farmer, family man and businessman, importing machinery from the United States and reselling it in Mexico. However, a frost and a crop failure in 1979 convinced John and his family to return to their ancestral roots in Manitoba.
They settled in Winkler and initially it was a difficult adjustment for John, who didn’t speak English but was determined to learn.
He caught a break when a relative suggested working as a truck driver hauling flax bales. He took the job and his work ethic, was quickly noticed.
He was offered an opportunity to haul flax bales from southwestern Manitoba and decided to relocate his family to Holmfield to be closer to the region. He bought a used school bus and cut off everything behind the driver’s seat, replacing it with a cab and plywood walls to contain the bales.
People stared and laughed at the vehicle when they first saw it, John said, but no one laughed about how many bales he hauled.
Regardless of weather, he hauled three loads to Winkler from southwestern Manitoba every day, even if he was hauling from Melita, which is a 500 km round trip.
Peter joined his father in the transport business and they continued until 2001, when Ecusta Paper, the U.S. company that owned the flax fibre processing plant in Winkler, went bankrupt.
All those kilometres hauling bales never satiated John’s love of trucking. For the last several winters he has driven logging trucks in Alberta and said he still likes to put in 15-hour days.
From John’s perspective, negotiating mountain roads for 15 hours isn’t work. It’s a vacation.
“If I had a choice to go three months to Arizona or go to Whitecourt, Alta., … and if both places I would get no pay, I would go to Whitecourt and haul logs.”
