M Bruenger Co
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M Bruenger Co
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Our Fleet as of 1946M. Bruenger Trucking started in 1936 because of a theft. Mr. Maurice Bruenger and his wife Leona ran a dairy farm near Wellington, KS and one day a hired hand dumped gasoline in our milk cans and skipped the country in the Bruenger family pickup. As Mrs. Bruenger remembers in a magazine article from 1988, " That hand was a likeable fellow, but I had never trusted him, although my husband did." She goes on to say that the hand had abandoned the truck is Virginia and that her husband took the train out there to bring the truck back. to keep from making the trip for nothing he filled the truck with apples and brought them back here to sell. In the early day he and Mrs. Bruenger hauled a lot of citrus out of the valley in Texas because it did not have to be refrigerated. When the company started there were no mechanical refrigeration units. The first units were just cooled with ice bunkers and blowers, powered by a gasoline engine with a blower to blow cool air over the produce. A far cry from the units we have now. In 1938 Mr. Bruenger made a bet with Dillons that he could haul a load of bananas up from the Standard Steamship Company in New Orleans to the store in Wichita. Prior to this, bananas came up on cooled railroad cars. At that time Grade A bananas were brought into America hanging from their stalks on racks. They were covered with plastic and hung in the trailers. He won that bet and we have been carrying bananas ever since. In 1951 M. Bruenger acquired their first mechanically refrigerated trailer, a Thermo King. Today, we carry over 149 trailers. The first trucks were a Diamond T, an International, a White, an International with the Fruehauf refrigerated semi-trailer, a Chevrolet, an International and another Chevrolet. Today we have Freightliners, Kenworths, Internationals and Volvos.
Picture was taken in 1946 |
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