There’s a strange rumor going through the trucking industry lately that truckers don’t look out for one another as much as they used to. The last ride for trucking professional Willis Leon Beckstead of Utah challenges that convention.
Professional truck drivers paid their last respects to the industry pro, and made quite an impression on both the family, and the local community in the process.
It wasn’t your everyday funeral procession when the family and friends of Willis Leon Beckstead escorted the longtime trucker to the Preston Cemetery on Wednesday.
Beckstead’s sons, who are also in the trucking industry, displayed their father’s chrome-trimmed casket on a flatbed trailer amid a convoy of semi-trucks driving down State Street as they delivered Beckstead’s remains to the Preston Cemetary in Logan, Utah.
Nobody loved trucks like he did, Beckstead’s wife, Julie, said of her husband, who died unexpectedly last week at age 72. He was a truck driver all his life and was still driving to Chicago every week with one of the boys.
Mrs. Beckstead said the convoy was something her son’s had talked about doing for years in the event of their father’s death, and they even joked with him that when he died they were going to make sure he got his last ride.
And the chromed-out casket?
They thought that would be perfect for their dad because he loved chrome, and he loved to keep his trucks nice and shiny, she said.