consequence. “Many years later, Ike wrote to Harvey Firestone, Jr. [the industrialist’s son] that the visit to Columbiana was still ‘memorable,’” write Paul Dickson and William D. Hickman in Firestone: A Legend. A Century. A Celebration . “It was the transcontinen- tal caravan that Eisenhower said ‘started
A. DUIE PYLE THE GOLDEN RULE Growing up on a farm gave Duie Pyle a good idea of the work ethic necessary to suc- ceed in business. “When interviewing prospective employees, he would always ask three questions: ‘Do you drink? Do you smoke? Have you ever worked on a farm?’” says Peter Latta, his grandson and current chairman of A. Duie Pyle. “The first two questions really didn’t matter – the last one did.” Duie Pyle valued the integrity and principles of working on a farm, where neces- sity was truly the mother of invention. This belief was similarly infused by the golden rule – treat others as you would like to be treated. Duie Pyle motivated and came to the aide of his employees, his extended family, with those words in mind. Latta points to two anecdotes recently unearthed while researching and writing a book about the history of the company, The First 85 Years – A History of A. Duie Pyle, Inc. There was a high school student named Preston Layfield (now 89) who was employed part-time on the Pyle family farm in the 1920s. One day Duie Pyle asked him to drive a truck to the company’s warehouse in Coatesville, Pa. “I told him that I had never driven a truck on the highway before,” recalls Layfield. “To this Duie replied, ‘You drive the truck on the farm, don’t you?’” So Layfield got in the truck and drove to the warehouse. When he dropped off the truck, he asked for a ride back to the farm. Instead, Duie Pyle told him to take the truck to the Lukens Byproducts Mill, also in Coatesville, and load it up. Layfield responded: “‘You think I can do that?’ He said, ‘You brought it in here, didn’t you?’” Again Layfield followed orders and drove the truck to the steel mill. Then Duie Pyle told him to go home and get a good night’s sleep – because he was tak- ing a load to New York City the next morning. “I had never been there in my life,” remembers Layfield. “But before I knew it, the next morning I was driving to New York City sandwiched in between other Pyle trucks. Unbeknownst to me, the other drivers were ordered not to pass me so if I was driving up a hill and had trouble shifting gears, they would be able to bump me up the rest of the way.” That was on-the-job training in Duie Pyle’s book. Peter Latta also cites his grandfather’s compassionate side, through the words of
Gladys Flamer, the wife of Paul Flamer, one of the carrier’s first drivers. Gladys, now 102 and still driving, recalls how Duie Pyle helped them when they got “sher- iffed” out of their house during the Great Depression. “My family had trouble paying the rent, but Mr. Pyle rescued us by pay- ing most of our overdue bills. And he gave Paul enough work to maintain our home and keep the family alive,” says Gladys. Duie Pyle found a new place for the Flamers to live – with indoor plumbing – a fact that Gladys gushed about. For Duie Pyle then, and for the company today, work and family remain one in the same.
him thinking’ about the value of good roads. While on the trip, the seed of an idea for an extensive system of highways took root.” But between 1919 and 1956 another important development ignited the idea kindled by Firestone’s Ship By Truck advertising campaign and Eisenhower’s military one: the birth of the modern- day motor freight carrier. Ninety years removed from that fair July afternoon, a day tangled in cele- bration and fate, Inbound Logistics turns back the clock to celebrate the trucking
Mr. & Mrs. Duie Pyle
September 2009 • Inbound Logistics 33
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