In the spring of 2012, Andrew Lueckenhoff set out to follow his father into trucking. A company called CRST sponsored him and sent him to school outside St. Louis — hotel during the week, classroom during the day, back and forth. He earned his Class A permit and passed the written exam on his first attempt.
Over the weeks that followed, most of the training came together. One maneuver didn’t, and after a few weeks he and CRST parted ways.
He came home and kept driving.
He went to First Student on Norman Drive in Jefferson City for his Class B, and passed within a week or two. By then he had real time in large vehicles, and it showed immediately.
“I quickly rose to the head of the class,” he says.
Out of six people in that class, he was the only one who never clipped the curb.
What he already knew
The reason he never clipped it is the first thing he’ll tell a new driver.
“Big vehicles, you’re not steering with your front tires. You’re looking at your side mirrors and you’re steering with those.”
“When you got a 40-foot-long vehicle, you got to be steering with your back tires. Let them tell you when it’s time to turn, not the front ones.”
He is matter-of-fact about the size of the thing.
“You’re eight feet wide, plus another foot on each side for the mirror. So you’re ten foot wide. You don’t have much room to play with when you’re driving.”
And a correction to a habit most car drivers have never examined: “That rumble strip is not there to be the knock on the door to say, hey, wake up, you’re drifting. You’re supposed to be kind of hugging that middle line.”
Ask him whether the job is hard and he pushes back on the framing.
“It’s only as hard as you let it make it to be hard. Just think of it as a vehicle that you just got to take a little bit more time with.”
A Tuesday
Andrew currently drives Route 44 for Student Transportation of America — a double, morning and afternoon. The A route carries 29 elementary students. The B route carries ten middle and high schoolers.
The day, in his telling, has no drama in it at all.
“The alarm goes off, you get up, you shower,” he says. “All you gotta do is make the donuts.”
Then the pre-trip inspection. Check the bus inside and out. Turn it on, turn it off. Test the brakes. If something isn’t right, the bus doesn’t go — he asks for another one, and takes it.
Then the route. Each stop, wait. Nobody there, wait thirty seconds to a minute, move on. All stops complete, all the kids who are supposed to be aboard are aboard, take them to school, drop them off, go do the next one.
When dispatch checks in, he gives them the nearest intersection and keeps rolling.
The part nobody warns you about
Ask him who demands the most of his attention on a route, and the answer isn’t the age group most people would guess.
It’s the youngest ones.
“They got way too many questions and they want to disturb you while you’re driving.”
His solution is not discipline. It’s material.
“I give them one or two little fun facts to keep them distracted the whole trip.” One good one will carry an entire route — thirty, forty, fifty minutes. Why is the sky blue. Why the Earth isn’t quite round but bulges at the equator, which he picked up watching the History Channel.
Music does the rest. Disney and classic rock. Nothing with swearing.
“Just keep them happy and distracted with the music, so they don’t distract you.”
When a student does act up, his instinct is to settle it on the bus rather than send it up the chain. A quiet word as they’re stepping off usually does it — a reminder that everyone on board, driver included, is trying to get through the same trip.
Attention to the details
Fourteen years in, Andrew knows the equipment in a way that goes well past operating it.
He can tell you what the markings on the side of a bus are for, and why they’re placed where they are — the kind of specification most drivers never learn and most passengers never notice. He asks about it constantly. Almost nobody knows the answer.
It also makes him a useful person to have around newer drivers. He’s usually the one in the room who’s been at it longest, and he’s happy to answer questions and pass along what he’s picked up. Experience like his tends to get shared informally, one driver to another, long before it shows up in any manual.
Where the work ethic came from
Andrew’s family has been working with its hands around Jefferson City for three generations.
His father’s side ran Lueckenhoff Brothers Construction, which built most of the apartments in the area from the fifties into the eighties. His mother’s people, the Kirals, ran Kiral’s Brazito Garage on Highway 54 between the Lake of the Ozarks and Jefferson City.
“Both sides of my family are hard workers.”
Before STA, he spent eight and a half years driving for a district just south of Jefferson City — end of August through the end of June, summer school included. He also spent time running city transit, the same loop seventeen times a day.
If you’re thinking about it
Andrew’s advice to someone considering the job comes in one sentence, and it isn’t about driving.
“If you want to drive, just remember: it’s not the job, it’s the people.”
The rest is practical. On testing, he’s emphatic that you should take it all at once rather than let it be broken into pieces.
“Memorize as much as you can, and then do it all at once. What I call data dumping.” He describes the relief when they turn the clipboard around at the end. Ninety-nine out of a hundred. “Yeah, I was that confident.”
On driving: “Leave yourself an out. Make sure you got plenty of room. Big vehicle, big room is needed. Space is your friend.”
And keep an eye on your mirrors, because cars will tuck in close behind a bus.
For anyone wondering how long the path actually takes in Missouri: three or four days to learn the book, the permit by about day five, another four or five days of classroom, behind the wheel by week three. Twenty to twenty-five hours of driving time. Start to finish, roughly three to three and a half weeks.
The last thing he said
Near the end of the conversation, Andrew brought up two phrases he keeps in mind.
The first is one everybody knows. “Silence is golden.” Stay quiet, focus on the task, drive. It gets you where you’re going.
The second one is his.
“Silence is not weakness. Just because you’re quiet all the time doesn’t mean that you don’t care and you’re not paying attention.”
Then he made it concrete, the way he does with everything.
“Just like the cameras on the walls in the buses. Just because they’re quiet, doesn’t mean they ain’t paying attention.”
Fourteen years of morning routes and afternoon routes, and a man who has been paying attention the whole way.