Youngest Alaska Highway Trucker? Without any doubt, Owen Ose holds that title. When three-year-old Owen piloted his truck on the Highway, the Corps of Engineers hadn’t even finished it. Owen, when he shared this claim with me a couple of years ago, hastened to add that the truck the youngest driver drove had “Tonka” printed on the doors.
Whew!
Owen’s dad worked as a manager for a civilian road building company in Minnesota, and in 1942 the Army borrowed his services from that company. They brought him north as a consultant to the Corps of Engineers. When the Corps completed the first draft of the Highway at the end of 1942, Dad gratefully returned to the relative warmth of Minnesota.
LInk to a story “Civilians on the Alaska Highway Project”
In 1943, though, the Public Roads Administration contracted with his company to send a whole crew north to do finishing work on the road. Dad returned to supervise that crew through the summer of 1943. And this time he brought his wife and two sons with him.
They lived through that summer adjacent to an Army camp, a camp that housed segregated black soldiers. Owen’s three-year-old memory didn’t know which unit the soldiers belonged to. For that matter he didn’t remember what portion of the road they worked on. But he remembered the soldiers.
Owen’s seven-year-old brother got to spend his days at the camp—with the cooks in the mess tent. Mom thought three-year-old Owen too young for that, so he spent his days piloting his Tonka on the Highway.
Finding Civilians who worked on the Highway
“My father and mother respected those men and we as a family had a good relationship with them.”