Vineland UPS driver honored for 55 years of accident-free driving

George Lodovico’s 55-year run without an accident was measured in more than 2 million miles, a streak that UPS marked in Vineland after a career that began on Dec. 3, 1963. The 84-year-old driver was recognized with a Circle of Honor patch for a lifetime of driving that, by UPS’s count, never included even a fender bender.

Lodovico started with UPS during the Christmas rush and stayed long after that seasonal job became a vocation. Before his delivery career, he spent four years in the Marine Corps, and he later built a reputation on a route where service mattered as much as mileage. He said the reason he remained with UPS was simple: he enjoyed helping people, and many customers on his route felt like family.

The ceremony in Vineland brought together past and present co-workers from the city where Lodovico spent decades on the road. He said he had no formal plans to retire and still expected to leave for work at 2:30 a.m., a schedule that reflects how little the job changed even as the region around him did.

UPS executive vice president and U.S. president Nando Cesarone called Lodovico’s 61-year journey with the company extraordinary, describing him as a living legacy and an inspiration. The company said its Circle of Honor now includes nearly 10,000 drivers worldwide with at least 25 years of accident-free driving, a number that shows how rare Lodovico’s record still is even inside a fleet built around safety.

The milestone also lands in a period when UPS has made safety a major operational expense. The company said it invested more than $500 million in safety training in the United States in 2024 and completed more than eight million hours of safety training for U.S. operations employees that year. UPS said it has recognized safe drivers since 1923, more than a century after its first driver handbook was issued in 1917.

South Jersey also has a deeper bench of long-haul safe drivers than Lodovico’s individual story might suggest. One local count put New Jersey at 225 active Circle of Honor drivers with 6,366 combined accident-free years, alongside 3,499 total UPS drivers in the state and 48 New Jersey drivers among 1,316 newly inducted worldwide that year. Lodovico’s record stands out inside that larger pool because it combines longevity, discipline and a lifetime of work done on Cumberland County roads without a single crash.