Aero’s Conestoga, the original rolling tarp system, is one of the company’s best-selling product lines. Yet, before it took off, you could say that the Conestoga was, well, a little unconventional. In this interview, Aero Industries’ Jim Tuerk tells the tale of how Aero’s rolling tarp system was born to fill a need at the General Motors proving grounds.

A bad recession began back in 1980, and we were struggling like crazy. When things in the trucking industry are going well and truckers are making money, they buy equipment. During those times, our business is great. But during an economic downturn, they just stop buying new equipment.

One day, about three years into that recession, I was out making sales calls on a nasty, drizzly day. I’d traveled up U.S. 27 toward Lansing, Michigan. I looked at the side of the road and saw a stack of dump truck bodies sitting in this guy’s yard. I’ve never seen anything like that before, so I did a U-turn on the highway and drove into the yard.

They had this little truck equipment house, and you could tell it was running on a shoestring budget. I got out of the car, and the mud went up to my ankles. I walked up to the building and opened the door, which opened outward, and got hit by a wall of smoke. I stepped inside and tried to find the manager. He was on the other side of the room, talking on the phone, with a cigarette in his hand. After a while, he hung up.

“Who the hell are you?” he said.

I identified myself, and then he asked, “Well, what are you doing here?”

I said, “I’m with Aero Industries. We make tarp systems and other accessories. Do you have a need for tarps?” The answer, “Nope”.

I told him that we are an accessory maker and I wanted to see if he had any interest. He said no, and I turned around to head out the door.

But as I was about to leave, he said, “Now, wait a minute. Do you do custom work?”

“We certainly do,” I said.

He said, “You know, I’ve got this customer over in Detroit. He’s got this contraption he’s trying to build, and he can’t get it to work. I need some help. Would you be willing to look at it?”

Of course, I’m starving at that point. “Yeah, I’ll look at it,” I said.

He picked up the phone, called this guy, and the guy told us to come on over. So, we climbed in a truck, traveled 45 minutes east and pulled off the highway onto a dirt road heading into the woods.

“Oh my God,” I thought. “This guy’s gonna cut me up!”

For a while we meandered through the woods and, all of a sudden, the trees parted, and we were at the General Motors proving grounds.

No idea. We must have come in a back entrance or something. We parked the car and went through the gate, then walked in and out of buildings and security two or three times.

One building was a garage, and in this garage was a wrecker truck with a tarp system on it.

A mechanic was there. I asked him questions and he asked me questions. I crawled all over the thing and tried to ask him what he was going to do with it. It was essentially a Conestoga on an 18-foot gray truck.

After about 20 minutes of back and forth, he finally said, “Well, can you do it?”

“Yes,” I said. But really, I had no idea.

“Well, how much?” he asked.

“Let me get back to the office, work something up and get back to you,” I said.

I headed home and worked with Bob Vernon, who’s really good with mechanical stuff and has been around every product in our company. We designed the tarp system together, and I roughed out some costs and quoted the dealer, who must have passed it on to General Motors. I didn’t hear anything for about three weeks.

Then one day, I looked out the window and the General Motors proving grounds truck had appeared on our front lot.

I called the dealer up and said, “Hey, this truck just showed up here. What’s going on?” He called General Motors and said, “You’ve got an order.”

They wanted us to put the tarp system on. That’s how the Conestoga got started. We ended up building it in February, 1984 and it worked great. They ordered five more of them just for the proving grounds. We were the first in the industry to have a sliding tarp system like the Conestoga. A competitor claims he was, but we beat him by a year. Both were separate developments.

It was a long gestation period. It seemed like it took forever to get going, and we went through three or four generations of design. I got my first patent in 1987, and another one a year later, then we hired a full-fledged designer who was a mechanical engineer. We released the product in 1993.