History

The story of Heavener Supply Inc. may contain many "red-letter" dates and a large cast of characters, but for the 60+ years that the company has been doing business, it's had only one address: Lower Salford Township, Pennsylvania. While this upcountry village, 30 miles northwest of Philadelphia, has lately been transformed by the arrival of upwardly mobile suburbanites, it was once part of a quiet stronghold of Pennsylvania Dutch culture. For nearly two-and-a-half centuries before its recent transfiguration, the area had been home to farming and craft working families of primarily Mennonite, Reformed, and Lutheran affiliation. These people had a reputation for working hard, worshipping devoutly, and eating well. They raised large families when they could, but they never crowded the land: the population of Lower Salford Township, of which Harleysville became the unofficial "seat:' hovered around the 2,000 mark for over 50 years prior to World War II. Until recent decades, "Pennsylvania Dutch" was the language of choice for many residents -including Township Supervisors, who conducted their meetings in "Dutch" as recently as 1962.

The area earned its earliest reputation as a center for clothing manufacture. Later it became known as a clearinghouse for local farm produce by virtue of its creameries, hatcheries, stockyards, and, as of 1934, the Harleysville Poultry Auction, considered to be the largest establishment of its kind in the country. Except for the legions of out-of-town buyers who descended on the little village on auction days, everybody knew everybody else in the pre-World War II days. Theirs was still a tightly knit, ethnically homogenous community, laboring steadfastly in the shadow of Philadelphia. This was the area that young Guy Heavener came to know when he moved here from West Virginia with his father, George, around 1924. The elder Heavener, a former farmer who had lost his first wife in 1920, had met Flora Klein, a Lower Salford woman, while he was attending mechanical school in Ohio. When that relationship eventually led to a proposal of marriage, George and Guy moved to the new Mrs. Heavener's home a mile west of Harleysville.

As George Heavener began his second career as a mechanic at the garage of Sam Landis on Main Street, Guy enrolled at Souderton High School. A year or two later, George bought the Harleysville garage outright, and moved his family to the accompanying house. With Guy now in close contact with his father's business, the value of practical training apparently began to overshadow the merits of formal education. He began putting in hours after school and on Saturdays for his father, and eventually left school altogether to work in the garage.
Two doors up Main Street from the Heavener home lived the family of Mennonite creamery man Elias Landes. Elias's teenage daughter Alice found new neighbor Guy quite to her liking. "I knew there was something there for me:' she reflected recently. "He was polite and hard-working -I knew this was the man I liked." It soon became apparent that the feeling was mutual. On March 13, 1929, before either of them had turned 20, Guy Moral Heavener and Alice Landes were married.
Their honeymoon was barely over before "Black Friday" dawned, presaging the Great Depression. Money had never been easy to come by for local farmers; now there was even less to go around. It was common practice for newlyweds of this era - even before the economy tightened -to move in with the wife's parents, so this is what Guy and Alice did for their first years of marriage, as Guy found work butchering cattle at Alderfer's Bologna plant just next door. It wasn't until two years later that they could actually "set up housekeeping" on their own, as tenant farmers on a farm near Mainland, two miles to the east.

It was on the Mainland farm that Guy's instincts as an entrepreneur, coupled with his Inclination toward hard work, began to bear significant fruit. In addition to his responsibilities on the home farm, he acquired machinery that enabled him to do similar jobs- including planting and harvesting-as "custom work" for other farmers. He also organized a combination garbage-disposal-and-hog-raising business. With a few partners, he contracted with some local boroughs to collect the residents' edible refuse, which he dumped onto a Model A Ford flatbed. Back at the farm, he shoveled the garbage right off the truck and into the mouths of waiting swine-effectively disposing of the refuse and fattening his livestock at the same time.

The Heaveners worked the Mainland farm for four years before moving back to Harleysville, around the time of 50-year-old George Heavener's death in 1935. Guy resumed his butchering at Alderfer's Bologna, but the taste of self-employment he had gotten while on the farm was apparently to his liking. He continued to find work with other farm hands in custom farming, while also trying his hand at coal retailing. This latter enterprise required that he drive his little dump-truck up to the mines around Hazleton, Pennsylvania for a load of coal one evening, then deliver it to customers in his home community the next. This made for some long days, but it was necessary to make ends meet. With the birth of son Duane in 1930, and daughter Elenore in 1936, there were four Heavener mouths to feed, and Guy was not one to sit around and twiddle his thumbs when a little extra application could mean a better livelihood for his family.

Guy Heavener's coal delivery and custom farming enterprises began to take off as the Depression eased in the late 1930's. He already had found enough work to keep several employees busy. Indeed, the prospects were bright enough that he decided to build a proper place of business, and work at his ventures full-time. On a little lot he purchased along School Lane behind the Harleysville Poultry Auction, Guy began building a home for his business and one for his family, all under one roof. The upstairs was to be half-residence, half-business and-storage, while the downstairs was dominated by a two-car (or two-truck or -tractor) garage. Work proceeded slowly on this building into 1940, with Guy doing much of the construction himself. At last, by September, the still-unfinished house had reached the point where it was livable, and the Heaveners moved in.
Out of this new location, Guy's business began to grow with new vigor. Custom farm work and crop raising on rented land provided work for many hands. Walter Kerr, hired at 25 cents an hour in 1943, remembers doing "a little bit of everything" during these pre-War years, lending a hand to half-a-dozen other Heavener employees "in the field". "We baled a lot of straw and hay, I'll tell you:' he says. Another favored crop was soybeans, which could either be baled as feed or, more often, cleaned as seed. Guy Heavener even bought a farm in Smyrna, Delaware, in an area of low real estate taxes, to ensure a steady production of his beans. Two upstairs rooms of the Heavener house served for soybean storage, with one room housing the cleaner. "It was a big black machine with screens in it:' recalls Elenore Heavener, who became acquainted with the contraption when she was a girl. "It made quite a racket, with the screens shuttling back and forth. And the dust! Chaff was blown right out of a second-story window.

For some years employees were kept occupied during the winter months either hauling and delivering coal, or maintaining Guy's growing collection of farm machinery. As his number of coal customers grew, Guy had coal storage bins built beside his house, one each for "stove:' "nut:' and "pea" sizes. Sometimes slower-moving "rice:' "barley," and "egg" coal were stored in piles beside the house.

Even as his primary ventures flourished, Guy Heavener looked for ways to diversify. He was already familiar with the waste removal business, so when an ailing local trash-collector offered him contracts for Telford and Hatfield, he joined forces with local farmer Zeph Alderfer to raise pigs and dispose of garbage, as he had earlier in Mainland. About this time, he also established a dealership in Richfield fuel oil, for which he acquired a 1,000-gallon tank truck. When the opportunities arose, he also sold some cement and fertilizer. These ventures carried the business through the war years, when Guy apparently had no trouble finding help. "There were a lot of men eager to do farm work, which earned them an exemption from military service," recalls Walt Kerr. "Practically anybody and everybody in the neighborhood worked for Guy at that time. His only problem was that he couldn't get as much coal as he wanted." The years immediately following World War II witnessed some critical developments for the company. Guy's son Duane, leaving high school at age 16 to work with his father, brought a passion for trucks into the business equation in 1946. He had much less interest in farming, and without his support, that facet of the company's endeavors would taper off at about the same rate that the trucking initiative would grow. Also in 1946, Herbert Knechel, Jr. came on board as a full-time employee after helping Guy combine rye in the fall. "I was going to go on my merry way after the harvest," Knechel remembers, "but Guy said, 'No, why don't you stay with me during the winter and run my new oil truck?' He wasn't putting out too much oil at that time yet, so I took over the oil and the gas, and we really built that thing up. People were just starting to change over from coal to fuel oil."

By July of 1947, when the time had finally come to incorporate the business, Knechel was considered valuable enough to join Guy and Alice in becoming Guy Heavener Inc.'s first shareholders. Duane was not old enough at 17 to own shares in the company, but he could certainly drive truck to his heart's content while he waited to turn 21. His father had recently bought four Diamond T trucks -two tractors, one straight job, and one dump truck and Duane knew his way around all of them. Guy had added a single trailer to the entourage, a flatbed with removable sides custom-made by the nearby Schlosser Steel Company.

The Schlosser trailer, along with a Diamond T tractor and a straight-job, made for an Interesting ensemble in the late 1940's and early '50's when Duane and Herb Knechel drove them piggyback out to Ohio to pick up sandstone. "We must have made at least a dozen trips like that," Knechel remembers. "It saved gas and wear and tear on the second truck. A couple of times, after Duane got married, we took our wives along. If Duane drove out, my wife and I would ride in the cab of the truck on top. Then halfway out, we'd switch, and him and Marie were up there. We measured before we left to make sure we weren't too high, but when we got to the first tunnel on the turnpike -I remember yet-boy, I pulled my head down! It looked like it was going to hit, sure as the world."
Sandstone was a new building material to the Harleysville area. According to Knechel, "Heavener's had pretty much the exclusive dealership in Ohio sandstone in all of eastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey. There were no competitors, really. Allentown was the closest, and they didn't bother with this section at all. We got our sandstone from Killbuck, Ohio, just south of Millersville. Every quarry out there had a different color stone. They would bring this stone in to the Killbuck plant where they would cut them to size, and blend the colors, make color combinations -six or eight different colors. They'd bring them up to the truck with a crane, but then you had to load them all by hand. They had helpers there to help with the loading and to make sure you got the right mixture and combination of stone. It wouldn't look good if you got too much pink, say. We might have had half-a-dozen different kinds of stone in a load. We hauled 16 ton with the trailer, ten ton with the straight job. That was about all you could scale at that time."

Some of the sandstone hauled back from Ohio was incorporated into houses Guy himself was building. Just after the war, he and half-a-dozen Lower Salford businessmen had pooled their resources and formed something called "The Home-Site Corporation:' intending to lead the way in post-war Township development. Initially, the corporation bought a 30-acre parcel of farmland between Maple Avenue and Route 113 in Harleysville with the idea of subdividing it into lots. Later, someone came up with the idea of actually building houses on these lots to increase their values. To this end, a lumber mill was built along Kulp Road, and carpenters were hired. About a dozen houses were subsequently erected -and then the initiative faltered.

In late 1949, the corporation was disbanded, and those who had invested in it divvied up the remaining assets, which existed primarily in the form of real estate. Guy wound up with some undeveloped land and an unfinished sawmill. Making the most of the situation, he determined to build houses on his own, using up some remaining lumber and even buying additional building supplies -such as sandstone and brick -to complete the projects. This undertaking got him into the building supply business for the first time in a serious way.

The former lumber mill building, half-a-mile down School Lane from the office, was converted into a truck garage. While never ideally suited for the purpose, it still represented a big improvement over the company's former maintenance and parking facilities, which were virtually nonexistent. For the first time, the trucking branch of the company had room to maneuver and expand. As Duane grew in responsibility -he married Marie Weber in 1950 and was soon to become a father for the first of five times -he remained eager to concentrate on hauling. Guy Heavener, Inc. stood poised to become both a major supplier of building materials in the area, and one of its leading trucking agencies.
The multifaceted company was at the right place at the right time. Post-war development was beginning to accelerate, and with the demand for building supplies increasing, one job usually led to another for Guy Heavener, Inc. For example, Nyce Crete, a Lansdale concrete manufacturer, needed sand, so Guy bought Trailmobile dump-trailers and began hauling sand up to Lansdale from New Jersey. Rather than make the front-end of the trip empty, he contracted with an asphalt manufacturer just across the Tacony Palmyra Bridge to bring in stone -from Rockhill, initially, then from the M&M Quarry outside of Harleysville. Once he had acquired a fleet of dump trailers, he began to get work from the Harleysville Feed Mill, transporting local grain to Philadelphia mills. Business had a way of begetting more business.

In 1951, Guy Heavener, Inc. switched over from Richfield petroleum products to Esso. "Richfield had us on a quota:' Herb Knechel explains. "We had built the oil delivery business up quite a bit by that time, and Richfield couldn't 'up' our quota. We were in trouble that one winter for fuel oil. We hauled it in from all over -wherever we could get a little more. On a couple of those truckloads, we paid three cents a gallon more than what we sold it for. But at least we didn't let customers run out. We were desperate, so that's why we switched over to Esso, who we could depend on." Earl Frankenfield was hired in 1952 to serve as the first deliveryman of the Esso era.

The Esso dealership gave the Heavener firm some new visibility. Fuel oil trucks were emblazoned with the Esso and Heavener names, with the Humble Oil Company picking up the detailing charge. Delivery vehicles also acquired roof ornaments in the shape of plastic dogs, emblematic of Esso's highly touted "Watchdog Service." "They were made out of fiber-glass' explains Earl Frankenfield "and we bolted them through the roof of the cab. Heavener's didn't care for that too much." "But they were good publicity," says Herb Knechel. "You even got kids working for you, asking their mommies and daddies to get oil from that truck with the dog on the roof. Earl had a leash around the dog's neck, which he took in through the window, and it looked just like he had a dog tied up there. He'd be at some of these farmers' places pumping gas and the dogs would throw a fit." Walt Kerr, who drove oil truck in his "little-bit-of-everything" role, tells a story about "coming down through Norristown after picking up fuel in Bridgeport one winter day. It was snowing like everything:' he recalls, "and a lady who was passing by stopped and really chewed me out for having that dog up there in that weather!"

In the mid-Forties, Guy had bought some adjoining land so he would have more than a toehold along School Lane. On this property he had built a storage shed, primarily for cement and soybeans. This little building, however, was not adequate given the company's increasing sales of building supplies and fuel products in the 1950's. Space limitations continued to keep "inventory" at a minimum. Brick orders were usually hauled from yards in Reading or Shoemakersville directly to job-sites. Large orders of coal and sand had to be handled similarly. When this arrangement finally proved too inefficient in the mid-1950's, six large storage bins were built beside the office-house to replace the three previous bins. Now the company could stock three grades of sand in addition to more coal.

Guy Heavener, Inc. circa 1955 was a company with a lot of irons in the fire. At one time or another, it dealt in grain, gravel, cement, sand, fertilizer, turkeys, soybeans, bricks, sandstone, buckwheat, coal, gasoline, pumice, and even string beans. "Everyone pitched in to do whatever was needed, and we put in some long days:' Herb Knechel remembers. "Guy never had any set hours. When he was in the thick of something, he stuck with it." He offers the following story by way of illustration. "We did a lot of farming of our own down at Wales Junction; where Merck is now. There was an 80-some acre field there. I remember one time, on the Fourth of July, we disc-ed that up, and started drilling in the afternoon, and they were talking about rain, and the ground was in beautiful shape. It got to be evening, and Guy said, 'I'm afraid it's going to rain before we get this in. If it rains tomorrow, we're going to have to work this ground again. What do you think? Should we go all night? Drill till we're finished?' I said, 'I'm game if you are.' So my wife brought supper down there for us, and we worked all night. By eight o'clock the next morning, we were all finished. And then It rained. I can still see Guy that night. He was getting the fertilizer and seed ready while I was drilling, and when I came around a couple of times, he was sitting there on a bag, sound asleep!"

During the Fifties, Guy Heavener, Inc. ran on the fuel of its founder's personality and work ethic. But Guy didn't just make things happen in the business world. He was a man of many interests, some of which had more to do with "making a life" than "making a living." "Daddy had a heart as big as a bushel basket:' reports daughter Elenore, who became a full-time member of the office staff when she graduated from high school in 1954. "If he could do something for somebody, he'd do it." An example of this was his collection of low-cost or donated food for disadvantaged people. "There are a lot of canneries down in Delaware and Maryland," Elenore relates, "and somehow or other -I guess through his farming -he found out where they were, and he would just stop in as he made his business rounds. There would sometimes be cases of canned corn or peas or tomatoes that had been held back, and they'd give him a good price on them, or even give them to him outright because they knew they were going to help the needy. He'd load them up, bring them home, and store them somewhere?' Eventually the food would find its way to mission ventures such as "Northern Light Gospel Mission" in Red Lake, Ontario, and the "Morning Cheer" youth camp in Maryland.

Guy was also interested in providing food for the spirit. "Daddy had more faith than I'll ever have:' says a respectful Elenore. "You always knew what he stood for. He had no qualms about talking to people -employees included -about church. And he really practiced what he preached. One thing he used to say was 'If I have to work on Sunday, then I'm too busy? Heavener employees were supposed to be home with their families on Sunday, and he saw to it that from Saturday night to Monday morning, the trucks didn't move on that lot. No one was to drive truck before Sunday midnight, at the very earliest. It happened, already, that when a driver had to go a long distance, he could leave at midnight, Monday morning. But if somebody borrowed a truck or something, you had that back by midnight Saturday, or else."

Daddy taught Sunday School class at Salford Mennonite Church for a long time:' Elenore continues. "I remember many a Sunday morning, he'd get awake at 6 o'clock, and he'd always be at the table, listening to a radio program from this church in Washington, D. C. while he worked on his Sunday School lesson." Guy also traveled out of state to take part in special religious services, and when he did, "he never went alone:' reports Elenore. "He always took a busload along."
Guy "ministered:' but he was also "ministered to- most notably by the music of gospel quartets. "Guy loved gospel music:' remembers his wife, Alice. "But it wasn't enough to enjoy it himself on the radio or through records. He wanted everybody to get to enjoy it. He used to travel as far away as Georgia looking for groups like the Couriers, the Weatherfords, the Statesmen, and the Harvesters to come up here and lead 'hymn-sings'.

Guy's other great love was farming, a passion he continued to indulge even as his company participated increasingly in urban development. Custom farm work had dried up in the early Fifties, but Guy made work for himself on his own land -initially on the Smyrna farm, and later on one in Maryland, which he purchased in 1958. "Land was more reasonable down there:' Alice explains. "Taxes didn't amount to too much. Guy raised soybeans, corn, and some other crops. Sometimes he'd be down at the farm for a week or ten days at a time. It would be time to plow or seed, so he'd go. He usually took a few employees along down with him to help."

Land in his home state was being heavily worked at the time, but it had nothing to do with agriculture. Work was proceeding on a major network of southeastern Pennsylvania roads, and Guy Heavener, Inc. often found itself in the thick of the action. During the construction of the Schuylkill Expressway, for instance, an undertaking which lasted very nearly the entire decade of the Fifties, Heavener trucks hauled ton after ton of stone and gravel to the riverside site. "Some of the stones we hauled out whole, not crushed:' Walt Kerr remembers. "They were some big ones, and we'd dump them right over the bank beside the river to make the roadway foundation solid?' Heavener trucks also hauled solid rock down to the Philadelphia Airport when it was enlarged, and a new gridwork of runways was built. Locally, the company's trucks were called into service during the construction of the Northeast Extension of the Pennsylvania Turnpike between 1952 and 1957, and as the Route 309 Bypass was being built. They helped out, too, as the Green Lane Dam was going up, and the contractor required a seemingly endless supply of sand for concrete.

This flurry of activity spurred the growth of Heavener's transportation division. In 1955, as construction of the nearby Pennsylvania Turnpike extension was under- way, the company acquired some urgently-needed wheels in the form of six orange GMC diesels that had been repossessed by Philadelphia bank. These trucks, along with two Autocars purchased a few months earlier, were the first of many diesels the company was to own. A change in Pennsylvania weight laws had just made diesel power practical. Herb Knechel explains: "Before 1955, the weight law in Pennsylvania didn't recognize any tandem-axle trailers. The gross weight was 47,000 pounds, period. It didn't make any difference how many axles you had. You could take a little gas job tractor with a single axle trailer and you could legally scale about 15 or 15 1/2 ton, maybe 16 if you had an exceptionally light trailer. Then the weight limit changed so that's when we went to diesel.'

In 1957, the company found it necessary to re-incorporate. "When the trucking side of the business expanded:' Herb Knechel relates, "we discovered that we were in violation as a Pennsylvania corporation. For some reason, Pennsylvania law said you couldn't be a common carrier-you couldn't have a P.U.C. or where they recognized the heavier tandem axle trailer, an I.C.C. authority to haul different things-as a Pennsylvania corporation. So we had the company changed over to a Delaware corporation." Delaware's newest corporation was helping to Harleysville on the map in the latter half of the 1950's. The company's inventory grew conspicuously along School Lane, particularly as brick began to play a larger role in the building supply business. Private swimming pools were gaining in popularity as well, creating a strong demand for cement. To keep up with such fast-moving products, Duane continually upgraded the company's fleet of trucks, buying six new White diesels in the spring of 1960 alone. Five full-time employees were kept busy in the office, which was not much more than a converted storage room on the second floor of the house. Eventually, this office location was outgrown, and a permanent home for the office was made in the remodeled two-car garage, where Guy had housed his tractors and trucks.

More drivers and trucks on the road meant a greater risk of accident -and higher insurance rates -so Heavener's instituted a driver safety program as the company signed on with Aetna Insurance in the early 60's. "We started having safety meetings the first Friday night of the month, I think:' says Earl Frankenfield. "We drivers used to eat at Ritter's or Barb n' Babs Restaurant, and then go up to the firehouse for a meeting. We'd watch safety films and discuss accidents, and decide if drivers would be charged for them." "Often there was an insurance man there:' adds Charles Breisch, Jr. "He'd bring pictures sometimes, or make a presentation. We had a 'Safe Driver' program, a 'Safe Driver' being someone who went through a whole year without hitting anybody or scratching his truck. They used to give you an award at the end of the year, at the Christmas Banquet". Year-end banquets had been held since 1954, when the first one took place at the Line Lexington Diner. For much of the decade following 1955, banquets were held at the Christopher Dock Mennonite High School.

In 1960, Guy suffered a heart attack, but was only momentarily slowed. According to Herb Knechel, "Guy just couldn't sit around. If his health had gotten to the point where he would have had to slow down permanently, he'd have gone crazy. He just wasn't that type of person." After the heart attack, Guy began gradually phasing himself out of operations at the Harleysville office, "but as far as puffing in time, he was still doing it down there," says Knechel. "Down there" was the company's Maryland farm, which Guy had bought in 1958. "He was in his glory on the farm:' Knechel adds. As it turned out, Guy's last hours were spent doing what he reportedly loved best. Herb Knechel describes the events of September 27, 1965. "That Monday morning, he had an appointment up at Grand View Hospital to have his blood checked, and I can still see him when he came back from the hospital. He came into the office around 8:30, all smiles, and said, 'I'm as fit as a fiddle. So I'm going to go down to the farm.' He was going down to plant rye. He said, 'As soon as I get that field ready, I'm going to drill rye till late tonight, so if I don't call you late tonight, I'll call you tomorrow morning.' So he left, just as happy as he could be. Then that evening, I think it was a quarter-to-five, the phone rang. Guy had another heart attack, and he was dead?' Guy Moral Heavener had lived 55 years, five years longer than his father.

Upon Guy's death, primary responsibility for the company passed to Duane Heavener. Though he had been working with his father full-time since 1946, he found that there were still some things for which he had not been prepared. His father's method of doing business, while well suited to an earlier time and a small company, appeared to need updating if the company was to survive into the 1970's. Duane bent his back to the task of creating a healthier and more competitive company. He probably hurt himself to accomplish that, working long hours short-handed to make sure there was a place for the children. Duane's wife, Marie, offers the following vignette as illustration: "I remember how Duane used to go over to the retail yard every year, on the day before New Year's, and take inventory all by himself-the whole works in one day!"

The decade following Guy's death would be marked by several major expansions. Guy had actually laid the groundwork for the first development in 1964, when he bought the sizable buildings and grounds of the neighboring Poultry Auction. The additional space would allow for much more equipment and inventory for the retail division in the busy years to come. For the transportation division, the time for major expansion arrived in 1973, when plans were made for a new and improved garage for the company's growing legion of Kenworth trucks (Whites were being phased out since the late 60's). When the boggy land encompassing an obsolete fire-pond next to the old garage was auctioned off by the fire-company in 1973, Duane Heavener was there to buy up the apparently unusable property. With the help of a pier-installing company from New Jersey, a firm foundation was laid overtop the former fish-and-muskrat haven, and by 1974, a spacious multi-bay garage was giving Heavener's trucking division some much-needed breathing room.

The trucking division was growing full speed ahead when it was hit in 1980 by the twin-whammies of Deregulation and Recession. Before Deregulation, the trucking industry was viewed as a justifiable monopoly. The reasoning was that a sound, profitable truck-transportation network was essential to the national security. So the government insured that those trucking companies that were in existence were somewhat protected. Prior to 1980, you had a lot of empty miles and could still pay your way because you had that economic protection.

"Then all of a sudden the doors were flung open. Deregulation immediately doubled the amount of equipment available for hire. The government made it extremely easy to get authority to haul. At first it sounds logical to open it up and fill those empty miles and stop the waste, but all of a sudden, everybody's 'front haul' became someone else's 'back haul: so everyone wanted to fill every mile with every kind of freight they could get their hands on. The whole revenue-per-mile scenario was drastically altered. It was very tough. That's the most severe test in recent years that the company's had to weather."

While the trucking division was struggling, the retail sales division was growing steadily, despite the fact that Duane "was never overly-concerned with our retail operation," as Keith puts it. "It wasn't the real love of his life:' he continues. "He liked big trucks, and that's where most of the money was spent. It wasn't until I showed a real interest in that side of the business that we started to upgrade our equipment and improve our materials and services."

If its founder could return, he might be surprised to find his little enterprise grown to include upwards of 30+ employees. He would find a retail sales company expanded to include brick, hardscaping, veneer stone, a wide range of masonry, fireplace, and landscaping materials, and a fleet of delivery trucks.

Guy Heavener would also find that some aspects of business carried out in his name have remained unchanged. "The specific types of commodities that we offer might be different:' says Keith, "but we're basically doing the same thing my grandfather did over 60 years ago. We still have the trucks, we're still hauling fuel oil, and we're still selling building materials. We have work we can do in the summertime, and work we can do in the wintertime. Ultimately, we're still trying to keep the Heavener name something customers can count on."