About half a mile up Morris Street from our current terminal, there was an empty 88-door facility with a large yard and a spacious shop with a wash bay. This terminal previously belonged to McLean Trucking before they went bankrupt. Overnite purchased it, and once again, we moved the operation without causing any disruption or delays in service to our customers. It seems we were getting pretty good at this moving thing.
This move happened around 1986 or 1987, because the union issue mentioned in the previous chapter occurred at this new terminal. There isn’t much to say about the move itself, except that not long afterward, our well-liked terminal manager, Ken Singleton, moved on—much to the disappointment of nearly everyone. He was replaced by, in my personal opinion, a real tyrant named Herb Gardner. I did not care for that man at all; I thought he was a controlling type. His arrival at the Indianapolis terminal made me seriously reconsider my employment options with Overnite, but I’ll share more about that in a later chapter.
1986 was also the year Union Pacific Railroad purchased Overnite for a staggering $1.2 billion—at the time, the most expensive acquisition of a trucking company in U.S. history. That purchase marked the beginning of the end of the Overnite family-oriented structure, in my opinion. I believe these facts are important to include if I want to tell this story honestly. Oh well, you have to take the good with the bad, I suppose. Despite all these changes, I still believe Overnite was, and perhaps still is, the best LTL freight company, even after everything that happened.
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