By LYNDON FINNEY, The Trucker Staff
SALT LAKE CITY — To appropriately and completely tell the story of one of the nation’s more successful motor carriers, a quick lesson in music and linguistics is in order.
First, the music.
In 1923, Frank Silver and Irving Cohn collaborated to write a folk song about a Greek who ran a fruit store. Quite popular in its day, we’re told; it faded from lore in recent generations.
“When you ask him anything, never answers ‘no,’” they wrote. “He just ‘yes’-es you to death, and as he takes your dough, he tells you …’Yes! We have no bananas, we have no bananas today.’”
Quite popular in its day, we’re told; the song has been lost to recent generations.
Now we turn to linguistics.
You’ve heard the saying, “You say potato (pa tay toe), I say potato (pa tah toe),” and yes, maybe the way we tried to illustrate the pronunciations isn’t what you’d find in a dictionary, but it drives home a point. And it does lead us to say that back in the 1940s, Chester Rodney England had plenty of bananas and soon could care less how someone pronounced potato.
He and his sons Gene and Bill just knew folks in Utah liked bananas and the people in Texas liked Idaho potatoes, and the three of them used those two commodities to parlay a small trucking operation into what today is a $750 million-a-year business known today as C.R. England.
What’s more, the company is still owned and operated by the England family, now in its fourth generation.
“Our family grew up in the little town of Plains City, Utah,” said Gene England, one of C.R. England’s sons, and who at age 87 is company president, still holds an active CDL and is in the office every day. “When I was a kid, there were 600 people living in the town. And, of course, dad was the local trucker. He was not a freight carrier. He was a man who bought produce from the local people and marketed it to people in nearby cities.”
Perhaps it should have been predictable that as the Plains City local trucker, a successful business would emerge.
After all, Swift Transportation began there. So did Knight Transportation and Pride Transport, which is owned by Gene’s son Jeff and where Jay England, is operations manager.
At age 14, Gene England had an Idaho driver’s license, which was legal at that time, and was making deliveries up through Cache Valley north of Salt Lake City. Today, he's still driving at 87.
Gene and Bill became familiar with the trucking industry at an early age.
During the summers, they would make the weeklong run with their father to Wyoming.
But the highlight of the whole trip was the feeling of importance that Gene and Bill felt when their father would brag about them to their family and to all the customers.
“Dad was our real mentor,” Gene England said, “and we admired him and loved him. He taught us to work together and that was the cement that put the company together.”
There really wasn’t a formal company in those days. The Englands used 1- or 2-ton trucks with attachments to make a three-axle rig.
“We were pulling almost as much weight with those things as we are today,” Gene England said.
During World War II while his sons were in the service, C.R. England began hauling bananas from El Paso, Texas, to Utah.
Then after the war, as Gene puts it, “We went after the trucking business. Our goal was to build a company.”
And building a company they did.
Today, C.R. England is one of the two largest carriers in the country whose primary freight is refrigerated (the company has some 5,000 trailers and about 90 percent of those are refrigerated).
“When we got back from World War II, I had been at work two weeks when we bought our first Kenworth truck,” Gene England said. “It wasn’t a new one because they just weren’t manufacturing any after the war.”
That first truck was a 1940 Kenworth conventional.
Gene and Bill would soon be heading to Texas with Idaho potatoes, and as their father had done before them, head back to Utah with bananas.
By 1957, the company was going from coast to coast. That included a 72-hour run from California to Philadelphia. “That was a real change in our program,” Gene England said.
Today, neither Gene, who will soon be 88, nor Bill, who is 84, is involved in the day-to-day operations of the company, but they continue to have offices at the company’s headquarters when in town.
C.R. England is now in the hands of the third generation.
Gene England had six sons, four of whom are top executives at C.R. England. Dan is chairman of the board. Dean is CEO. Todd is executive vice president, maintenance and Corey is executive vice president, operations support. Another son, Jeff, has his own company, Pride Transport, also located at Salt Lake City. Jeff England’s son, Jay, is operations manager there. The sixth son, Rod, passed away in 1995.
Like his father, Dan England’s early taste of the trucking industry came from going on long trips with his father.
But Gene England urged Dan to pursue a career in law, so after earning his undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Utah and spending two-and-a-half years in Germany on a mission for the Mormon church, Dan England went into law practice in the mid-1970s.
Part of his practice included working to get authorities for C.R. England in the pre-deregulation era, and it didn’t take long for him to get back into trucking full time.
“I left [law practice] in 1977 and came to work for the company and have been here ever since,” Dan England said.
While he said it was always likely that he would eventually wind up working at C.R. England, it was not a foregone conclusion.
“I always enjoyed growing up in the business and just part of being an England is being involved in the trucking business,” Dan England said. “I was intrigued by it, helping to grow it. The company was doing well and I wanted to work with my dad, brothers and uncle. So that was always good motivation.”
Family and the values of a close-knit family such as the Englands continue to be keys to the company’s success.
That, plus the fact that the Englands are real truckers who know what it feels li
