Trucking's Trailblazers: Edward J. Buhner

'Gentle Kentuckian' Pushed Trucking Safety To The Forefront

Edward J. Buhner Served Key Role In Defense Transportation During World War II

By Jennifer Botchie
ATA Web Editor

Edward J. Buhner
Feb. 13, 1901-Dec. 24, 1980
ATA President, 1947-48

The American Trucking Associations took a new direction in recent years, guided by the decisions of the 1998 Wren Committee. But long before the Wren Committee, or even the Few Committee of the 1980s, there was the Buhner Committee, led by Edward J. Buhner, who later became ATA's second president. It was this committee that laid out the foundation for ATA's organizational structure.

Buhner's work in what was originally called the "Committee on National and State Organization of the Trucking Industry," leaves him remembered as one of the key figures in making ATA the strong association it is today.

"Edward Buhner was one of the Association's most important chairmen," said Larry Strawhorn, ATA vice president of engineering. "He led the committee that laid out the early structure of the organization, spelling out the relationship between ATA, the states and the conferences."

Buhner was born Feb. 13, 1901 in Seymour, Ind., and his father owned that town's first motor truck, which the younger Buhner soon wanted to take for a spin.

"[Buhner] recognized this chain-drive vehicle as a valuable asset to his father's fertilizer business, but he couldn't visualize, of course, how deeply his life would be affected by it," said a Jan. 27, 1974 article in the Louisville (Ky.) Courier-Journal.

Like his predecessor Ted V. Rodgers, the "courtly, gentle Kentuckian" is viewed as a father figure to the trucking industry for his guiding role during its infancy. Harry D. Woods, a trucking researcher from the Woods Highway Truck Library of Hammond, Ind., was gathering information on the history of the industry when he told the Courier-Journal he had established that Buhner was, "beyond question," the father of the American truck transportation industry.

"His influence in the Indiana and Kentucky legislatures, and in the federal government in Washington, helped most to establish transportation by truck as the second-largest industry [behind agriculture]," Woods said in the article.

And also like Rodgers, Buhner was starting trucking companies at a young age. In 1930, he started his own refrigerated truck operation between Louisville and Chicago - purchasing one truck with the help of his two brothers and borrowing another. He also established Louisville's Silver Fleet Motor Express in 1937 and later became its president and principal executive officer. At the same time, he also founded the Buhner & Co. feed mill in Louisville.

World War II Involvement

During World War II, Buhner assisted the U.S. government by heading the service and operations division of the Office of Defense Transportation, which was organized to help move materials needed for the war more quickly. He was later made chairman of an ATA committee, formed of for-hire carriers, to assist the ODT in three problem areas caused by the demands of the war: the lack of drivers and new equipment and the scarcity of truck replacement parts.

ATA's second president was in great demand through the years; he served on and also headed a variety of committees, both in ATA and elsewhere in the trucking field - the ATA Safety Steering Committee, executive board and finance committee, the Indiana Motor Rate and Tariff Bureau, the Indiana State Code Authority and the legislative committee of the Indiana Motor Traffic Association, to name a few.

But it was on the committee that came to bear his name that he left his greatest mark on the industry. Buhner chaired the committee that formed in 1944 and continued its work through the spring of 1947, producing six reports that defined the operation and responsibility of ATA as well as its state associations and conferences.

"The … examination, prepared in the early 1940s by a committee led by Kentuckian E.J. Buhner, reflected the strong feeling among carriers that ATA should be the single voice of the trucking industry. To encourage unity, it recommended procedures to resolve differences between conferences and ATA that also preserved the right of independent action 'when all efforts for resolving differences have been exhausted,'" according to a June 1, 1998 Transport Topics article.

"The 'Spheres of Functions' section of the Buhner Report clearly delineated the individual and mutual responsibilities of each segment in detail …" wrote Bob Halladay in his book "Partner In Progress: The Story of the American Trucking Associations." Later committees examining ATA's structure always fell back on the Buhner Committee's outline; the Few Committee in 1984 "recommended that the Spheres of Responsibilities be 're-endorsed in spirit and observed in practice by all parties,'" Halladay wrote. Indeed, the foundation laid by Buhner's committee is the same one on which ATA stands today, more than 50 years later.

Safety First

While Buhner may be best known for his work prior to becoming ATA president, he was certainly active in that role and in the years after he served. He was dedicated to an objective that is still familiar today: trucking safety.

"Improvement in the safety and courtesy performance of the trucking industry is my major objective," Buhner told the Missouri Bus and Truck Association in his first official speech as ATA president (Louisville Courier-Journal, Dec. 2, 1947). "I am willing to subordinate every other single activity to the extent necessary to achieve sharp and substantial improvement of our record on the streets and highways of this nation."

Halladay wrote that Buhner "continued to be both active and interested long after his 1947-48 term," including taking on the role of trustee of the ATA Foundation. He had been one of the founders of the Indiana Motor Truck Association in 1931 and was later named a lifetime honorary member; he also was a past president of the Kentucky Motor Transport Association and was the first person named to its Hall of Fame, in 1970.

Trucking was not the only area in which Buhner was active; he was director of the Seymour National Bank, president of the Buhner & Co. feed mill and chairman of the board of the Seymour Lutheran Community Home.

"Ed Buhner was one of the finest people we had in the trucking business," said Harwood Cochrane, founder of Overnite Transportation. "Everyone loved and respected [him]."

Published: Nov. 8, 2001

Note: I originally wrote the "Trucking's Trailblazers" series while employed as web editor with American Trucking Associations. They were published on the ATA website, truckline.com (now trucking.org). After a site redesign a few years later, the series was no longer available. An archived copy can be found through the Internet Archive. This blog post was created by copying the text from the archived copy and is shared here as is, minus any photos that were not archived, and the captions for those photos.