Rest in Peace Yellow Freight System
The closing of this 99 year old company was a hard pill to swallow for 30,000 employees and several thousand retirees. Yellow has been part of my life going back to Yellow Transit days and being in grade school. My dad was a mechanic in their Baxter Springs, KS shop and for32 years. Evidently, like me he enjoyed that company having that many years, while I had 38 years in many different positions and I retired in 2008.
Some things just stick with you, like the powerful name of Yellow Freight System. To the day my dad passed away in 2003 he still called it Yellow Transit, so just the name Yellow was powerful in and out of the trucking world.
One of my last jobs was overseeing the State & National Truck Driving Championships. All the drivers that compete in the event have to be accident free for year and remain that way from their state competition to the National event.
Many people have asked me, “What are the truck driving championships.” Well, the program is supported and ran by the American Trucking Associations (ATA) and goes back to 1937 and was called the National Truck Rodeo.
During my 18 years involvement with the event and 11 years running it with a great support team made up mainly of Safety Managers we saw Yellow have five National Grand Champions and four Professional Excellence Award Winners, several ATA America’s Road Team Captains as well as Yellow Transportation Road Team Captains. The best part of my job that I dearly loved was working with professionals. Every driver that competed in the State Championships and the National Championships are professionals.
None of this could’ve have happened without the support of Yellow’s upper management. During my tenure is was the last five years it was the executive branch that supported the event and welcomed the drivers and their families which made the drivers proud to represent their company with pride and made Yellow Transportation a force to reckon with at every event.
Back in 1999 the ATA asked me to come up with a closing video featuring all the trucking companies and drivers and family attending the event and make it lively. That event was being held in Tampa, FL. Dick & Dot Espy of The VideoWorks in Kansas City handled the video for Yellow at all of these vents so, Yellow did just that, we made the closing video and did so up through 2007 until I retired before the 2008 event. Then we also produced a copy for the participating Yellow drivers in the event with the closing video at the end and sent it to those drivers. The video you’ll see here is the 2006 NTDC in Tampa, FL and the ending is the closing video at the Saturday night Awards Banquet.
What a great company then and will always hold a place in my heart as it will with many others and I will wrap it up saying, “A tragedy that shouldn’t have happened. just plain sad. “Just sayin’”.
