Fikes Truck Line: an honest ‘partnership’ that’s puts Hope on the trucking map

By LYNDON FINNEY
The Trucker Staff

2/1/2008

HOPE — The Associated Press, the world’s largest news gathering organization, has this steadfast rule about datelines: the name of the state in which the city is located must be used unless the city is well known.

Mostly, “well known” means you have a major league sports franchise there, i.e., Miami, St. Louis, Philadelphia, etc.

There are some exceptions, mostly notably Oklahoma City (the reason is obvious) and Little Rock (because of the media attention during the Clinton administration).

Now, we’re ready to add another.

Hope as in Hope, Ark.

You know, that town in southwest Arkansas made famous by former President William Jefferson Clinton, presidential wanna be Mike Huckabee and President Jim Smith.

And just who is Jim Smith?

While you won’t find his picture on a billboard or a campaign sign in front of his home, Jim Smith is probably as well known in the trucking industry as are Misters Clinton and Huckabee in the political arena.

All he’s done over the past 25 years is turn what was essentially a one-man operation into a highly successful trucking company with some 500 independent contractors delivering freight all over the country.

Fikes Truck Line is certainly a dream come true for a man who gave up M & M’s — music and meteorology — for a career in trucking.

Born in Nevada County, Arkansas, not far from Hope, Smith’s father moved his family to Kansas City in the 1950s, where his father built a successful development company.

It was a good place to go and one of the few places in the country mushrooming at the time, he said.

After high school, he enrolled in the Kansas City Conservatory of Music to study theory, harmony and arranging, but as a young man, became somewhat impatient.

“I was 20 and thought ‘well shoot, if I haven’t made it in the music business by now, I’m too old, I’d better get out and try something else,’” he recalled.

He decided to join the Navy.

“I tried to be a pilot. I qualified for the school with one exception,” Smith said in an interview in his office at company headquarters here. “They put me through aviation prep and then they gave me a flight physical and I failed it. So I chose Naval meteorology.”

Which might have been OK if not for the fact that after he got out of the Navy and went to work for the weather bureau, he was asked to man a new observatory in the new state of Alaska.

He declined the assignment and went to work for a paint company where he got his first taste of trucking because he was involved in shipping.

 “I was the liaison with sales and shipping so I guess back in those days I could have been called a shipping clerk or an expeditor. I started noticing these [sales] guys who came around and patted the traffic manager on the back and brought him scratch pads and all that other stuff (ash trays and matches) and they all had on nice suits and ties and drove nice cars,” he said with a chuckle.

He learned about a sales position with Gordon Transport in Kansas City, applied and got the job.

He stayed there 10 years before joining Arkansas Best Freight where he worked at an Ashville, N.C., office and then as director of sales at ABF headquarters in Fort Smith, Ark.

But then Gordon Transport beckoned and he moved to Memphis as vice president.

“Actually, I made a real good mistake,” he says now. “The third generation had just inherited the company and they came over and talked to me and made it sound like I could save the company. So I went over and discovered immediately they didn’t want to save the company. Their goal was to bring it down as far as they could and take the assets and go retire at 31 and 35 years old. They didn’t want a division of independent truckers like we have now at Fikes. So they asked me to head what they called their Lightening Division. So we got it started, but I knew then I wasn’t going to hang around there any longer than I had to and was looking for something to do.”

That something was a desire to own his own company.

He’d gone to Malvern, Ark., trying to strike a deal, but it didn’t work out so he headed back to Memphis.

His journey took him to Pine Bluff, Ark., where he stopped to have lunch with a friend. Smith told him about the failed effort.

His friend told him, “There’s someone I didn’t even think about,” Smith said. “He’s 71 years old and I know him pretty well. I think he might be thinking about selling his authority.’ So he took me over to meet Horace ‘Bullet’ Fikes and we talked about 15 minutes and had a deal. I drove back to Memphis and told my wife we were moving to Pine Bluff. By that time, I’d already resigned at Gordon’s so she knew something had to be done.”

That was in 1981.

Now fast forward to 2008.

Sitting across the desk from Smith is Gary R. Salsbury, the first independent contractor Smith hired when he bought Fikes.

Today, Salsbury is the company’s senior vice president and chief operating officer.

About a month later, Smith hired an independent contractor named Jerry Davis.

He’s now the company’s vice president of safety and insurance.

It’s a testimony to how Smith built his company — from the ground up and from the inside.

Salsbury grew up on a dairy farm.

“All I knew was that I didn’t want to milk cows the rest of my life because that was a 24-hour-a-day job seven days a week,” he said. “I had this foolish dream that trucking wouldn’t be. So I bought my first truck in 1978 when I graduated from high school. All you had to have then to drive was a chauffeur’s license.”

Salsbury hauled rocks, gravel, lumber and rice.

But he was looking for more, especially when the sawmill in Waldo, Ark., shut down.

He was telling an acquaintance about his situation one day when his friend told him about Smith.

“So I called Jim one day on the telephone and talked to him and he pretty much told me the story he told you,” Salsbury said. “He basically put everything he had in this little company in Pine Bluff and he told me his vision for the future. The words that really got me were ‘it’s not a matter of if it’s going to work, it has to. I’ve invested my savings and we have to make it work.’ And I said ‘well if