ON THE SQUAREFreight and Logistics
Bringing goods into and out of Butler was different 50 or 60 years ago. There was no Federal Express Ground, no United Parcel Service, no Amazon. What we did have was dedicated workers at the Post Office and LTL (less than trailer load) truck lines, plus some couriers that picked up and dropped off specialty items.
I just missed the old REA (Railway Express Agency) that used to bring packages from the train depot to your door. The REA company switched to small trucks after the trains no longer carried small parcels.
We could figure on mailing an order to Sears & Roebuck or Montgomery Ward and receiving the requested product (or a substitute if out of stock) in a couple of days. The mail trucks came at least twice a day, oftener in holiday season, and a postman walked the Square delivering and picking up mail early in the morning, and he (all men, usually service veterans) delivered mail again in early afternoon, then returned to pick up the dropped mail in the mailboxes at 5 p.m.
Parcel post, as USPS packages were called, came in mid-morning. Another package carrier was “Exhibitor’s Film Delivery”, or EFD, a company that began with small trucks that picked up film reels from theaters late in the evening and shuttled them in the night to other towns in time for the next day’s showings. Then they began accepting packages to ride along on the film truck, and the business grew from there until UPS went nationwide, putting EFD out of business.
UPS had been around in the big cities for many years, but had ignored the countryside until the 1960s. Then the ubiquitous brown trucks starting coming out of new sorting centers all across the U.S., forcing parcel post to scramble to keep up. We used to be content to get our goods from Kansas City in two or three days, but spoiled Americans soon wanted “overnight delivery.”
Federal Express began as a college project in the 1970s by Fred Smith, who envisioned small jets flying high-priority cargo in the night skies to get there the next day. FedEx dropped down to ground delivery methods in the 1990s and its competitors like DHL starting showing up in Butler as well.
But, in the beginning of my tenure on the Square, we were well served by Gaylord and Margaret Hill’s “Hills Truck Line” running out of Adrian and from their terminal in Kansas City. Harold Ackerly serviced Butler and went beyond just “here’s your stuff,” with a punctual, helpful “where shall I put it?” Hill Truck line took small loads to and from towns all up and down 71 Highway.
Jim and Florella Tiona, meanwhile, grew their truck line into a powerhouse of commodity shipping all through the latter 2000’s, from their Butler and Texas terminals. Other custom haulers included trucks carrying hides from the Cox Hide Company plant in west Butler and the beverage trucks from Coca Cola and 7-Up plants, and beer trucks from Kermit Salmon’s warehouse south of town. Bread trucks fanned out daily from the Butternut and Wonder bakery warehouses here.
Some of the couriers included the film processors, who took exposed camera film from the stores on the Square with a photo department, using a special lockbox on the sidewalk, dropping it off the next evening so you could get your finished pictures from the lab in two days. Medical and bank couriers had their rounds to make as well.
With no four-lane highway, the driving wasn’t always easy, but we were used to it. Deliveries got made, shipments went out and the good old Post Office was dependable.
