Children’s enthusiasm for big trucks grows exponentially with the size of the truck, judging by the reactions of kids Sunday to the 10-foot tall, 10,000 pound Raminator monster truck, which was on display, and crushed a row cars, Sunday at the Dick Hannah Ram Truck Center.
Before the Ram truck-sponsored beast crushed a fairly on-brand selection of trade-in sedans including a Hyundai, Toyota, Volkswagen and Ford, hundreds of onlookers had a chance to check out the monster rig and chat with the crew.
Posing for photos, signing autographs and answering questions for wide-eyed kids is a big part of the job, said team crew member Steven Walker and driver Kurt Kraehmer.
The truck, part of the Hall Brothers Racing team, is based in Champaign, Ill., and was in Vancouver as part of one of their regular mini-tours around Dodge Ram dealerships, said Walker, who helps handle the truck’s maintenance.
The truck and team set the monster truck speed record in 2014, when the Raminator clocked in a 99.10 mph.
They started in Sagal, Idaho, and went to Chehalis before making their last stop in Vancouver.
Theirs is the only major vehicle manufacturer-sponsored truck in the monster truck business, Walker said, and much of what they do is putting on small events for dealers.
“Once we got to the dealer we set it up, we talk with the dealer, what they’re planning on, then we set up the cars, hang out here, interact with everybody, answer questions with the kids, take pictures with the kids, then we do our car crush and do autographs afterward,” Walker said.
That’s his favorite part, he said.
“Watching the kids come up and see the truck for the first time is absolutely awesome.”
All these kids, he said, usually only see these things as toys, on TV screens or far away, from the stands.
“Being able to be up close and personal with it, it’s awesome. They climb all over it. … The tires, especially little kids, they love to sit in the rims and stuff. They use the wheelie bar as a jungle gym. They’ll be swinging from it.”
Walker grew up around trucks, monstrous and otherwise.
His father worked on a truck crew, and he worked as a mechanic at his parent’s shop in Pennsylvania. Eventually, they bought their own truck, the kind guests can ride in, and they’d tour all over the East Coast.
One day, the Hall Brothers team came calling, and he joined up.
“I absolutely love it. Being somewhere new every weekend and all that stuff,” Walker said.
Kraehmer’s path to the driver’s seat was much less straightforward.
“When I was a kid, this is all I wanted to do, and I just kind of never gave up on that,” he said.
As he grew older, he started dabbling in different kinds of racing, then went to college for a degree in criminal justice, thinking, for a time, that he wanted to be a police officer.
“Which, of course, is like 180 degrees off from monster trucks,” he said.
He eventually got a job with Caterpillar, building wheel loaders. That ended up being beneficial, he said, because the work gave him practical, formal mechanic experience.
Caterpillar laid him off when the economy tumbled, so he moved on to driving tractor-trailers. Again, he said, he benefited from that in the end; it takes a heavy hauler, and a crew each with a commercial driver’s licenses, to move a monster truck.
“All the while, I just kind of never gave up on getting into monster trucks,” he said.
After four of five years driving a tractor-trailer, he sent a resume, cold, to the Hall Brothers Racing team. He sat for an interview, was turned down, and then hired when the other pick didn’t pan out.
“I started at the bottom, working my way up as a crew guy, and three-and-a-half years in I started driving trucks,” he said. “I’ve been driving monster trucks for about a year now.”
Sharing that with people, especially the kids they meet, is one of his favorite parts of the job.
“I kinda want to inspire kids,” he said. “Kids that have a dream to keep going for it, because I did it and they can do it. Some people might get a harder break than others, and you can still make it if you can persevere.”
