Moving Family

The four sons of Holland-born Sjoerd Bekins felt fenced in by the family's small moving business in Lincoln, Neb. In 1895, they set out in four directions (Omaha, Texas, California and Washington) to build the biggest moving & storage business in the world. They did.

Last week, on their 50th anniversary, the Bekins Van & Storage companies, located in Omaha, Dallas, Los Angeles and Seattle, had 37 warehouses throughout the west, 430 vans, 1,270 employes (plus some 14 key Bekinses). Still operating on the happy family plan, the companies run a trainlike transcontinental van line, have 37 U.S. offices, took in $5,500,000 last year, moved more than 30,000 tons of home furnishings (the firms cannot handle general freight under their Interstate Commerce Commission permit).

The biggest unit of the world's biggest home movers is, quite naturally, in movable Los Angeles. Son Martin established it in 1895, with a one-horse wagon that carried the furniture of land speculators over a dust-choked, rutty road from Los Angeles to San Diego. Time : five days.

Facing bankruptcy, Martin Bekins thought up, built and personally operated a covered van which proved unexpectedly successful. In 1904, he introduced the first motorized van. When Sjoerd's grand son Milo (now 53, senior family member, and president of California Bekins) was ready to go to work in 1919, he had an already flourishing business to develop.

Vanliners, Airvans. The third-generation growth of Bekins of Los Angeles is typical of the expansion of other Los Angeles businesses. The four companies spend $250,000 yearly on advertising. Householders now use Bekins "vanliners" (large enough to carry 14 rooms of unpacked furniture cross-country) and "portal vans" (detachable from trucks for hoisting aboard ocean liners). When the Government evicted the West Coast Japanese in 1942, Bekins moved more than 60% of them to relocation centers. When the Ninth Service Command moved lock & stock from San Francisco to Salt Lake City, Bekins handled most of the job. Last week, in Los Angeles County alone, the company moved more than 1,000 families.

Tall, grey, imaginative Milo Bekins has consistently paced his cousins, now running the other three companies, but not in a win-or-die fashion. Everything is for the good of the family.

He has promoted many a warehouse improvement: 1) leather-lined rooms for expensive furniture; 2) special mothproof rooms; 3) refrigerated vaults for furs. And last week he was working on a new idea he hoped would revolutionize the moving industry--an "airvan" which can be hauled to an airport as a truck trailer, and connected to a wing assembly for immediate takeoff.

Milo is not sure the thing will work. But he has bucked odds before.

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