A lot can happen in five and a half decades, especially if you’re Dick Parker. A man for whom little introduction is needed, 76-year-old Dick is one of the most affable characters of the New Zealand trucking community. He’s been there, done that, and has the stories to keep you entertained.

You can judge the character of a man by the company he keeps, or so the proverb goes. When that man is Dick Parker, and the company he keeps says in jest “I’m not sure you can print those stories!”, before bursting with laughter, well… you know you’re dealing with a man of immense character. Even if the man himself is quite modest about it.

With a career approaching six decades long – and still going – Dick’s made the acquaintance of countless people, and a select few remain friends today. Friends such as Neil Peterken, Graham Sheldrake, and Gary Johnstone – immense characters in their own right. This is some good company, and it doesn’t take long for the stories to flow.

Dick on the White (literally) doing logs in Waipu, October 1965.

“I wrote some notes, there’s probably a story on each chapter [of my life],” says Dick. “Whether or not anyone will want to hear about all of that I don’t know.” There’s that modesty again…

Born in 1945 and raised in the eastern Waikato farming area of Ngakuru, Dick attended Sacred Heart in Auckland but left at the age of 15 with the ambition of being a traffic cop. Prohibitive school results put paid to that ambition and so Dick landed up back on the farm.

“When I was a kid, we had to milk cows from day dot, and of course I hated that. My mother found me a job as a shepherd on top of the Mamakus – that was interesting,” he says. But for two-and-a-half years something other than sheep would grab Dick’s attention as he’d stand in the hills. “I’d watch the trucks go by all the time and I thought, ‘That’s me.

I want to be a truck driver’.”

Balancing logs without a grab. “It’s a wonder we didn’t kill ourselves.”

Hard work in a different era

After a short stint at Shorts Transport in Rotorua, Dick moved to Northland to drive logging trucks for the man he worked for on the Mamakus. “And that was the hardest I’ve ever worked,” Dick recalls. Dick and his two colleagues had to fell the trees, haul them and then cart the load (one a day) from Tinopai bush into Lovett’s Mill, Whangarei.

“We had no safety helmets, gloves, nothing. It was bloody unreal. It’s a wonder we didn’t kill ourselves. The loader never had a grab, we had to balance the logs. Mate, you try do it, it’s bloody hard!” Dick says.

Unfortunately, Dick’s time on this job came to a fiery end. “One night we came in late, it was about 10pm. I said to the guys I wanted to take the load into town and pick up my car, and I’d come in with them in the morning. They said no, we’ll stay overnight and go get it in the morning. So we did… and my car was burnt to the ground. Some savage arses took the motor out, wheels off and burnt the rest!

Geany’s depot on Te Ngae Road, Rotorua – it was a big outfit with all sorts of trucks.

“The boss thought it was a helluva joke. I was that wired I told him to stick his job up his backside and I left. Left his truck right there.”

It was time for a break, and so Dick and his family headed back to Rotorua. In town, Dick’s then-wife happened to see Dennis Geany at the Princess Gate Hotel. “She jacked up a job for me with him,” Dick says. Geany’s was one of the largest carriers around in those days, carting nationwide with about 30 livestock trucks based at the company’s yard on Te Ngae Road in Rotorua. (You wouldn’t find that yard today…

It’s under a shopping centre.)

In his 10 years with the company, Dick drove everything from S-model Bedfords, Commers, Internationals, and the best and only new truck he drove – a 2233 Mercedes-Benz. His driving career would come to an end at Geany’s when he broke a windscreen coming back from Taihape one day. “In those days, the windows just shattered. I came back to Rotorua, put a new one in, and they sent me to do a job in Auckland. I kept rubbing my eye and the next morning I woke up and my eye was out here,” Dick demonstrates holding his hand in front of his face. That, combined with the “long, long hours” at Geany’s, meant it was time for Dick to move on.

Dick’s 2233 Mercedes-Benz, the only new – and best – truck he drove.

He bounced around for a few years, working as “a grease monkey”, driving trucks and buses, and working in retail. Sometime around the mid-1970s, he found himself looking after an electrical shop when Neil Peterken of Road Runner Trailers came in.

“He bought a vacuum cleaner. And he said I should come work for him. Then he came and bought a shaver. He came back about three times, but I was looking for a business to buy and not in a hurry,” Dick says with a smile.

“One day Bill Assen [the shop owner] came in and said there was a set of keys for me. I said ‘what?’ There was a brand new Toyota Corolla outside for me, he said. I didn’t know anything about it, but I took it home and parked it in the shed and just waited. The next thing Neil came into the shop and said ‘Well, aren’t you going to come work for me?’

“I said I was still thinking about it. He said, ‘Come out and see me on Saturday, bring the car back and we’ll decide then.’ So I did; they were having a party for some reason and I thought ‘Gee, what a great bunch of guys. I’d better work there’.”

The match of Dick Parker and Road Runner Trailers had been made and the rest, as they say, was history.

One of Geany’s Mercedes-Benz stock units.

Trading a trailer for cabbages

“Did he tell you about the bloody cabbages? That was funny, aye?” asks Neil Peterken when I call him to chat about the Road Runner days. “Dick was a typical salesman. He’d do anything to get the deal – giving things away – and I’d have to figure out how to make it up,” Neil says with a laugh.

“But he was good; he had the gift of the gab, but he knew what he was talking about.”

It’s clear Neil and Dick have great affection for one another. “Neil was one of the best guys I ever worked for. He was great. I made a lot of mistakes but he backed me. I could make decisions and sales, which was really great.”

One of two Internationals Dick drove in the early days.

Decisions that today would probably land you dusting off your CV. “One particular time, we had a trailer we couldn’t sell. It sat for ages – but I finally got rid of it,” Dick says with a wry smile. “A Pukekohe grower was interested in it and wanted to trade a Fairlane car for it. I told them sure, if they fill the boot with cabbages and lettuce for us. Well, they didn’t just fill the boot – they filled the whole car up!” Dick laughs.

“I didn’t tell Neil, and when he turned up, I wasn’t at the yard. He rang me up, asked me what I did and gave me a bollocking! So I told him, and he said ‘Well, what are we going to do with the car?’ I’d already sold it to the painter, and Neil said ‘that’s a good deal!’. And the whole staff helped themselves to cabbages,” Dick says, still laughing.

“I used to shudder at times and think, ‘What the hell have you done now, Dick’,” Neil says with a laugh.

In the end, it was all worth it – Dick took Road Runner’s secondhand sales into making a profit when new sales weren’t. Naturally, he was shifted across.

April 1985 write-up on Dick and the Roche TV show.

Showing the Aussies how it’s done

Dick’s time at Road Runner was filled with opportunity. One of the first – and one Dick remembers fondly – was to get three trailers over to Australia, build them up and show them off. “We were way ahead of them. We had the steering jinker and other things they didn’t have at the time,” Neil explains.

Dick recalls: “Unbeknown to me, while we were there, Mercedes-Benz wanted us to demo one of the trailers with a brand new Merc truck and all the set-up. They didn’t have a driver, and Neil jacked me up to drive for about a week, which I enjoyed very much.

“They wanted to know what I’d do different. Well, the truck was too new and so stiff it should never have been a demonstrator. It wouldn’t go. My arm just about fell off in the end, trying to get it into low gear for the steep tracks.

“One night, a big German guy came up to me and asked me to dinner with them. When I told Neil he said, ‘What? I wasn’t invited?’ The whole reason was they wanted me to work for them as a Mercedes-Benz demonstrator in Australia. I didn’t know what to say because Neil only just gave me the opportunity. They offered quite a good wage, a Mercedes-Benz car, and a house. It was too good to be true. The guy said, pointing to his shirt, ‘You see this badge; you can go anywhere in the world with this badge.’

As seen on TV: Road Runner Tautliner and Mack R-model from Roche.

“At the time, Hammlex [trailer manufacturer] was looking for a salesman, and they offered me a job too. I was like, ‘holy hell’! From not having any real job all of a sudden, everybody wanted me. Neil wasn’t very happy about it, but he said. ‘I’ll see you right’, which he did.”

Salesman turned stunt driver

Many will remember the shortlived TVNZ truckie show called Roche, but not many will know that the man doing the truckdriving stunts was one Dick Parker. MTD’s Ron Carpenter loaned the Mack R-model hero truck, Road Runner loaned a branded Tautliner trailer, and once again, Dick’s expertise behind the wheel was volunteered by Neil.

“The producers came up to see me to get some stories on trucking. We used to have a ‘gardening session’, we’d call it, on Saturdays at lunchtime, a whole bunch of truckie guys … all experienced drivers. So they came to the pub to get stories. A lot of stuff in the film was actual stories of things that happened,” Neil says.

                      In the office at Road Runner during the 1970s. “I’ve gotta be careful what’s in the background here,” laughs Dick.

“I got $110.65 a day. I was a class-B actor, a stunt driver. We drove from Wellington to Auckland, and they took pictures here, there and everywhere. I drove through pickets, high-speed chases… They cut a lot of it out. I believe they cut the best bits out,” Dick says.

Perhaps his most famous stunt was ‘parking’ the baddies’ old Atkinson (which, incidentally, was bought off of Neil for the show) in a river after they flogged the Road Runner trailer. “I was going down into the river, and the crew was recording me. I threw it into a bit of a slide and straight into the river. It was perfect! But the way they had the cameras set up, they thought I was going to run them over, and they didn’t get it on film because the cameramen scattered!” laughs Dick.

The old Atkinson was retrieved, revived and reset for the shot. “We re-did it, but it wasn’t the same,” says Dick.

“One thing I couldn’t believe, we had a S-model Bedford bus where everyone got changed. The women just stripped off, they didn’t care! I couldn’t believe it!” says Dick as he demonstrates how he’d ‘hide’ behind his newspaper while the women got changed.

 

Dick at NZT

“I fancied a couple, thought ‘gee, they’re quite neat’. But nah…” says Dick, recalling a big night that was put on for the Roche team. “I thought, ‘this’ll be good’. Well, all the girls danced together, and all the boys danced together – I just couldn’t believe it! The guy who was organising it, he was a good bugger. He said, ‘different scene here, hey boy?’ I said, ‘shit you’re not wrong!’.

It was around that time Dick courted a little controversy. He shows me a write-up on Roche from the April 1985 issue of New Zealand Trucking magazine. “This really pissed me off. They did a write up on me and the show. I can’t remember who it was but he said, ‘Off the record, what are the actors like?’ I told him they were a bunch of poofs and he writes it in here! I had to face the guys after that. I honestly thought they were going to lift my head off!” Dick laughs.

Dick’s time on Roche led him to do some other work for TVNZ, and there he met a chap called Arthur Russel, who ran Russel Towing. “He was a fantastic guy,” recalls Dick. “I ended up at his place every now and then playing cards or whatever, and all of a sudden the emergency siren on the police radio would go, and he’d be off to be first at the accident to pick up the cars!

“Once, we retrieved two people from the Paraparaumu Beach. They were parked up having a bit of a cuddle, and the tide came in, and we had to tow them out. Things like that were quite funny. He was sharp, made a lot of money too.”

Dick shows off the Road Runner steering jinker in Australia. “We had people leaning out the window looking back; they couldn’t believe it was steering.”

Lubricating the business process

“One day, I was sitting at a table at a funeral…” begins Dick as he dives into his next anecdote. “One of the blokes, Beau Maru, got up and said, ‘Got to go, off to Patchell and Kraft.’ I asked why, and he said he wanted to get some skeletals built for Laos. I said, ‘No, stay here, I’ll get another jug…’”

Fortuitously, Dick and colleague Paul Cranston ended up shipping parts for four units to Laos and heading over there to assemble them. “He came over there and assembled the trailers in the middle of the jungle. They weren’t used to working in those conditions. It was quite interesting watching that,” says Beau.

“That ended with us selling 28 trailers and heaps of parts for a copper-ore operation over there. That was quite an experience for me, seeing how they live in Bangkok, and Laos,” Dick says.

“They arrived there and had to wash out of a big 200-litre drum and eat insects instead of having a Western meal. I remember they came back out and I was already in Bangkok, and the story goes Dick and the guy with him got off the plane, saw a McDonald’s at the airport and raced to it!” Beau laughs.

“One time Paul had an EBS unit in his bag, and I had some Manco couplings in my bag, and at the airport they thought they were bombs!” Dick continues. “In fact, we weren’t even supposed to be doing what we were doing. But it’s all corrupt over there, and we took a lot of whiskey.”

Breaking-in the Mercedes-Benz demo truck across the ditch.

Great mates, great states

Another of Dick’s fondest memories is a more recent one when he and three mates – Graham Sheldrake, Matthew Sheldrake and Gordon Gallagher – went on a boys’ tour of the United States. The main event of the trip was attending the Mid-American Trucking Show in Louisville, Kentucky. “That was a real highlight,” says Dick.

“But this was the best holiday I ever had, and I couldn’t believe how friendly Americans are. Each of us had a wish list of what we wanted to do. Sheldrake wanted to go to a rifle range – he bruised himself from shoulder to hip from the recoil. While we were there. I wanted to shoot a .44 Magnum one-handed, like Dirty Harry. Boy, even holding the gun with both hands, it nearly flew out of my hands! “My wish list included going to Nashville. We didn’t realise there were 400 nurses on course there. We went to bars; bands played two hours at a time before the next one came on. It was great! They had a bucket in front of them, you threw money in, and that’s how they got paid. You could see which were great and which weren’t,” says Dick.

“Dick is a country music fan and loved our time in Nashville,” says Sheldrake.

Of course, more truckingrelated activity was to be done, and the lads headed for a tour of the Freightliner plant in Cleveland, North Carolina.

“The travel agent sent us to the wrong Cleveland! We had to drive about 400 miles to the right Cleveland,” Dick laughs. “But that was great, we called into the truck stops along the way.”

Dick’s NZ Couriers Isuzu: “Did 500,000km in the Isuzu, never cost me a quacker, never let me down.”

Stories for days

From driving trucks and selling trailers to making friends and memories in far-flung lands, what Dick has achieved in his professional career he’s managed to replicate in that other important side of his life, sport.

Over eight years during the Geany’s days, Dick drove stock cars, racing for the Rebels for three of those years. “Stock cars was really great. The sport was a lot better back then because you could build a car for $5000 and the regulations weren’t as strict as they are now.”

But if Dick had to claim one sport as his, it would be tennis, which he played competitively for 25 years. It’s also the reason he left Road Runner after 10 years to buy a courier run with NZ Couriers and Parceline. “In my time with Road Runner, we were wining and dining and eating and drinking – putting on too much weight and getting awfully unfit. That was the reason I did the courier run, to keep fit. I did that for five years and, in that time, we got five New Zealand veteran titles.”

Dick and his partner of 35 years, Sonja.

Most recently, Dick was dragged into a veterans Pickleball tournament in 2019. “I’d never played, and I didn’t really want to do it, but we went up to the North Shore and cleaned up!”

Today, brother-in-law Craig Beazley gets the ‘thanks’ for introducing him to trout fishing…

Not that that’s all that keeps him busy. Dick has two demanding grandchildren, and the role of senior vice-president of the Wasps Rugby Club and life membership of the Rotorua Citizens Club ensure he remains a valued member of the community.

And of the trucking community, too. Dick can be found selling used trucks three days a week – “or four, or five”, he says – at NZT in Rotorua. “James [Worsnop] contacted me and said, ‘You’re not retiring, you’re going to come work for me’,” Dick says. “He’s an expert and a breath of fresh air. At NZT, the circle is a lot bigger, selling a bit of everything – I’m learning fast about selling trucks.”

Left: Hoot ‘n Nanny poster. Middle: Jodi Vaughan entertaining at one of the Hoot ‘n Nanny events. “She used to keep the truckies happy,” recalls Dick. Right: The ill-fated Swissmaster concertina doors, brought in by Road Master, could’ve really been a winner with the right mechanisms, says Dick.

“In my eyes, he’s one of the industry’s legendary salesmen. We’re lucky having him onboard,” says James.

With James’s recent acquisition of Kraft Trailers, I ask if a move back to trailer sales could be on the cards for Dick – it would be the fourth trailer manufacturer to be associated with him (including Roadmaster and the shortlived Opinion).

“We’ll see. I used to deal with the fathers. Now I’m dealing with their sons. Things are a little different,” Dick says.

As they would be after more than 50 years. But what a career, what history, what stories.

Dick would like to acknowledge some of the other people he didn’t get • the opportunity to mention, especially those from Dynes, Lamberts, RFH, Hira Bhana, Vowles and Normans. “I’d like to mention a lot more … but we couldn’t fit everybody in. I’ve met many good friends in the transport business and made friends with my trailer opposition and truck manufacturers. Most of all, I’d like to thank Sonja Beazley, my partner of 35 years, for all her support.”

                                   
Left: Life member of the Rotorua Citizens Club. Right: Trailers or trucks, Dick’s a trusted name in the game.