Towing his own way: Retiree having a blast in second career

Monday, August 15, 2005

By Rick Steigmeyer

You've probably seen his truck parked in a parking lot on North Wenatchee Avenue or at the corner of Mission and Ferry streets. Sometimes he's parked in front of Grant Road Ace Hardware in East Wenatchee.

It's hard to miss the trucks. He has two of them. They're billboards on wheels, advertising the services available to those in need. In bold white letters on a dark blue background, the signs read: “Anthony's $40 Cheap Tow.” Additional writing lets you know Anthony's cell phone number and the region he services for your $40, about a four-mile radius centered on Wenatchee.

Inside the cab of the late model Ford F-250, you'll usually see Anthony Poortinga. A dapper fellow with short cropped hair, he often wears a light blue denim cowboy shirt with pearl snaps and a red bandana around his neck. He looks younger than his 58 years.

He'll be reading a book.

“I have an insatiable reading appetite,” Poortinga said during an interview held at his other hangout, Jimmy's Diner, off Rock Island Road. Or did he say 'insatiable waiting appetite.'

His truck cab is his office and also his reading room in which he often sits and waits or works 15 hours a day. The sign on his truck says he's available eight days a week.

“Why not? This is fun. I used to work for a living, now I'm retired,” he said.

He retired a couple of years ago after a successful, but lonely, career as a private contractor installing power and telephone poles throughout the Northwest. He's lived in East Wenatchee since 1979, but never made any friends, he said, because he was always out of town installing power poles.

Now, he said, he's always meeting people while providing service to others. He said he has no shortage of friends and is having more fun than he's ever had.

The banter he carries on with waitresses and other patrons at Jimmy's Diner proves his point.

When there's no one to talk to, there's always a good book to read. Poortinga said he cruises through a novel a day, on average, while he waits for calls. If his work day is too busy, he'll stay up half the night to get to the end of an exciting mystery or thriller by writers like Michael Connelly or Dean Koontz.

His voracious hunger for books often has to take a back seat to his work. His cell phone rang twice with jobs during the 40-minute interview over lunch. Some days, work keeps him hopping, more so as people see his truck and referrals come in by word of mouth. He said he doesn't make a lot of money but that the business is paying its own way while he does what he enjoys.

Poortinga said he started the business about 18 months ago after he built a flatbed trailer to haul race cars. When people started asking him to haul their cars, he was on the road to starting his own business.

Asked what his competitors think of him, Poortinga said he's friends with them all.

“When they pass, I always wave at them. That doesn't mean they always wave back. Some wave in a different manner,” he said.

Poortinga said he started the business to stay busy in his retirement and also to develop a business for his daughter, Erin Reyna, 27. She took classes in tow service safety last winter and is now training with her father so he can have some time off and they can have two trucks in operation when needed. Poortinga is working on a larger flat bed truck with winches to use on bigger jobs.

He's also painting his signs on an additional pickup truck that he can park on another busy street as advertising. The trucks, he said, are his only form of advertising.

“I've always done things a little different from the rest,” he said. “I've always blazed my own trail.”