Truck Club uses annual show to raise money for charities

Gaileen Jackson calls her 1965 Chevrolet short-bed truck her blue baby.

“My father and I restored it in the backyard,” said Jackson, president of the Genuine Chevy GMC Truck Club of Kansas City. “I bought the truck in 1994. I bought it because of a childhood memory. The neat thing about trucks is everybody has a childhood memory of one.”

Steve Mosley, vice president of the truck club, is currently working on restoring a 1951 Chevrolet Suburban.

“I have always been crazy about mechanical stuff,” Mosley said. “I always wanted one when I was a kid. As an adult, when I got a truck, I immediately started working on it. From my standpoint, I wanted something simple to work on.”

The passion that Jackson and Mosley show for trucks explains why the club has grown from four members when it started in 1995 to more than 180 now.

To most people familiar with the club, the Genuine Chevy GMC Truck Club of Kansas City is known simply as the Truck Club.

“We got carried away and windy when we were making the name a long time ago,” Jackson said. “We are a group of individuals who all appreciate and like to preserve Chevy and GMC pickups.”

Early in the club history, members wanted to do more than gather and talk about trucks and share truck stories. They wanted to make a difference in their community.

“We decided a long time ago our goal was to help others with what we have,” Jackson said. “We like showing off our trucks any time we get the opportunity. But we also want to do it for others and not just for ourselves.”

From that commitment to help others came the annual Midwest All Truck Nationals, which celebrated its 16^th annual show Sept. 11-13 at E.H. Young Riverfront Park in Riverside.

“This year we had approximately 300 trucks,” Jackson said. “We had 217 trucks registered. We didn’t count club members’ trucks in the registration.”

The money raised through donations and sponsorships goes to Operation Breakthrough, Toys for Tots and Hope House.

Operation Breakthrough, at 3039 Troost Ave., Kansas City, is the largest single-site early education child care and social services facility in the state of Missouri, serving more than 400 children daily from the urban core.

Hope House provides victims of domestic abuse a shelter.

“Operation Breakthrough loves us,” Jackson said. “We will pull up with a truckload of diapers, truckload of food, new coats and gloves and hats for little kids who don’t have those things.”

As for Toys for Tots, Jackson said they look for organizations that have Toys for Tots donation drives and deliver toys they bought from funds raised from the Midwest All Truck Nationals.

“We are kind of a loud, quiet bunch,” Jackson said. “In other words, we don’t have our own event for Toys for Tots. We go to somebody else’s event. We crashed an event last year and they loved it. They already called and wanted to know if we are going to crash their event this year.”

The growing pains of the Midwest All Truck Nationals actually came in later years when the club worked to keep the truck show as big as it had become.

In the beginning, Jackson said, the truck club just enjoyed the thrill of putting on a truck show in the Midwest.

“Usually we would go to a show and there would be 20 car classes and two truck classes,” Mosley said. “We thought there ought to be a show just for trucks and show appreciation for trucks.

“There were other all-truck shows in other parts of the country. There just wasn’t one in the Midwest.”

The first Midwest All Truck Nationals was in 2000 and it had 82 trucks entered. The money raised went to Toys for Tots.

“We were very excited about the success of the first show,” Jackson said.

The show grew to 90 entries the next year and 100 in the third year.

The show exploded in the fourth year with a 131 entries, and the money raised doubled from the previous year.

“It is like a reunion,” Jackson said. “So many people come back every year, and that’s when we see them. We have two different groups that make it their yearly reunion.”

There have been two participants who have brought trucks to all 16 shows.

Jackson and Mosley are already in the early stages of planning next year’s show.

“We go over what worked well this year and what we need to change,” Mosley said. “First of the year, we really hit it hard. It is a year-round project. We like to change things, try to keep it fresh.”

This story was originally published November 12, 2015 at 6:18 PM with the headline "Truck Club uses annual show to raise money for charities."