A Piece for P.I.E.

In soupy weather over San Francisco's Crissy Field one day in 1927, a pilot of Pacific Air Transport circled and sweated, trying to land. On the ground, other P.A.T. men laid bets that he would never get down alive. But he did ground."

"You're damn right!" said Johnson.

A good man on the ground, Johnson soon joined Humphries in a management team. After a stint in P.A.T. (eventually absorbed into United Airlines), they worked in the construction supply business before tackling their biggest job in 1941. In that year they were hired by Edward H. Heller, New-Dealing California businessman and later a member of the Surplus Property Board, to pull his Pacific Intermountain Express, a West-Coast-to-Chicago truckline, out of the red.

Short, rumpled A. K. Humphries took over P.I.E. as president and laid the broad plans; short, trim Gene Johnson went in as assistant general manager and carried them out. They cut costs, won new business by maintaining rigid delivery schedules, turned a profit inside a month. In 1949, P.I.E. highballed 407,000 ton miles of freight across country for an estimated gross of $14,250,000, making it one of the biggest U.S. truckers. (The biggest: Associated Transport's motor freight system, with a $25.3 million gross in 1948.) But that wasn't big enough for Humphries & Johnson.

Coast to Coast. Last week they were winding up a deal that will nearly double their size. Chicago's federal court had approved their $1,940,000 bid for the bankrupt trucking company that Chicago's burly, brash John Keeshin had sprawled over 17 states from Boston to Washington and up through the Midwest to the Twin Cities. Overexpanded and harried by labor troubles, Jack Keeshin had pulled out of the line in 1945 (TIME, Nov. 12, 1945) just before it slumped into bankruptcy. Nursed back to health by court appointed trustees, the Keeshin Freight Lines made $484,000 before taxes in 1948.

When P.I.E.'s routes are spliced to Keeshin's, P.I.E. will have a 24,000-mile coast-to-coast truck network, winding through 23 states and the District of Columbia. By running Keeshin's routes with P.I.E. efficiency, Humphries & Johnson think they can truck freight from coast to coast in 9off sleep with coffee. A P.I.E. run from Oakland to Chicago uses a relay team of ten men, one for each section of the route which twists up the gear-grinding slopes of the Rockies and through the Midwest plains to the East.

ICC must still approve the Keeshin deal, but Humphries expects the final O.K. this month, thinks that P.I.E. has a good chance to gross more than $25 million and become the biggest U.S. trucker.

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