Mike Rowe Just Made $1.5 Million on His Truck, But He’s Not Keeping It

Movieguide® Contributor

Wonder where the money for this year’s mikeroweWORKS scholarship came from? The sale of the DIRTY JOBS star’s truck.

In January, Rowe sold his custom 1962 Dodge Ram Power Wagon at the Barrett-Jackson Scottsdale auction for $1.5 million.

The 2008 Ram chassis featured a chopped cab, suicide-style doors, a steel front bumper with a winch, and a flatbed and work boxes. It has a 1,000 hp Mopar Hellephant supercharged V8 crate motor. It took over a year to make and over 10,000 hours to complete.

The bid opened at $50,000 and ended minutes later with a bid of $1.5 million. Rowe commissioned the car to raise money for his scholarship foundation.

Rowe doesn’t know who gave the generous donation.

“Thank you so much,” Rowe said after the auction ended. “I don’t know who did that, … I promise you, every penny, work ethic scholarships, we’re going to train the next generation. I promise you we won’t let you down.”

The scholarship amounts to $2.5 million in total. It’s for anyone who’s currently enrolled in a trade school who needs help paying their way through their program, with some limitations.

Rowe hopes his efforts will help solve America’s trade crisis.

He said, “Recruiting in the trade fields is a big problem for American companies today. We have millions of positions open and an untrained labor force to fill them.”

Related: Mike Rowe Scholarship Sees Record Surge Amid Trade Crisis

Rowe created the mikeroweWORKS Foundation in 2008, to help fill the gap. He sums up the idea behind his work movement in his “S.W.E.A.T Pledge,” which stands for “Skills and Work Ethic Aren’t Taboo.”

“The evidence suggests we’ve taken some very bad advice and tried to separate hard work from success,” Rowe said. “Consequently, we’ve become profoundly disconnected from a critical part of our workforce. The skilled part. The part that keeps the lights on. That’s just crazy.”

“Our crumbling infrastructure, our widening skills gap, the disappearance of vocational education, and the stratospheric rise in college tuition — these are not problems,” Rowe said. “These are symptoms of what we value. And right now, we have to reconnect the average American with the value of a skilled workforce. Only then, will the next generation aspire to do the work at hand.”

Read Next: If You Want to Learn a Trade Skill, Mike Rowe Can Help

Watch THE CHOSEN: Episode 3.4: “Clean, Part 1” →

Quality: - Content: +3

Watch MONSTERS AT WORK: Season 1: Overview Review →

Quality: - Content: +2