One of the strangest twists of fate in the truss business was initiated by Larry Rogers, and fortunately it boosted his career and that of his replacement, Dickie Vail. Out of this occurrence, both men launched successful startup companies. However, there was also a flood and more than one bankruptcy that had to be surmounted along the way. Dickie unfortunately left us too soon in 2022 and Larry sold his business to his employees in 2016, but both left an indelible mark on the truss business.
Larry and his 10-year younger cousin Dickie grew up in the tiny town of Bastrop, Louisiana. After finishing school, they traveled in opposite directions to find work. Larry ended up 30 miles south of home in Monroe, Louisiana, at American Building Components (ABC) where he quickly rose to the General Manager position. Dickie ended up 100 miles north in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, at Rawick Manufacturing where he helped management greatly expand their truss business.
After nine successful years at ABC, Larry was recruited by Lenny Sylk to run his Houston, Texas startup. After informing his owner, Lamar Buffington, that he was leaving, Larry recommended Dickie as his successor. In 1980, Larry moved his family to Houston, bought a house, and reported to work in Lenny’s plant in the suburb of Tomball. Dickie moved his family back closer to his home town and took the GM job at ABC.
After only a few weeks, small-town-reared Larry realized that he did not want to raise his family in the maelstrom of America’s fourth largest city, so he called Mr. Buffington to get his job back. Learning Dickie had taken it, he put his Houston house on the market and returned to Monroe to examine his options. To his credit, at age 35, Larry had accumulated $80,000 in savings (the equivalent of $200,000 today) and he used that money to convince a local banker to back him with a $500,000 loan to start his own truss business. Since he clearly couldn’t afford a Gang-Nail press like he had at ABC, he called Hydro-Air (MiTek’s predecessor) to get something he could afford. That’s when I ended up in Larry’s living room with local Hydro-Air rep Karen Crawford. After seeing the “For Sale” sign in Larry’s yard, my suspicions were aroused. That feeling was heightened when I saw the large crack in the concrete slab beneath my feet, just as I saw cracks in Larry’s plans to compete against a well-heeled owner with a well-equipped plant. Added to these red flags was Larry’s skepticism that a $15,000 Hydro-Air C-clamp would be as effective as the $50,000 Gang-Nail table that he knew so well. But some of that skepticism faded after Larry drove to Mabank, Texas to watch Tom and Bart Whatley masterfully manipulate a Hydro-Air C-clamp in the shed behind their Dad Otis’s house.
While Larry was busy setting up his business across the Ouachita River in West Monroe, Dickie was hard at work reaching across the state to raise ABC’s production levels. Fortunately for both, the Federal Government was stimulating rural housing construction via the Farmers Home Loan Program. To qualify under this program, these homes had to be affordable, necessitating mostly straight gable roofs spanning about 30 feet, which yielded plentiful orders of easy trusses. In 1981, Dickie had enough of this work to go after the World Truss Production Record and to wrest it away from Jack Littfin’s plant in Minnesota (see also my previous article, “Vertical Presses – The World Record”). But Dickie’s crew was only building 628 trusses in the amount of time that Littfin’s crew built 963, so he realized he needed the machine Littfin was using. By 1983, Dickie convinced Mr. Buffington to invest $100,000, a staggering amount in that day, in a Hydro-Air Glide-Away machine. With this machine, Dickie shattered Littfin’s record by building 1017 trusses in an eight-hour shift with a crew of three, an unbelievable 2,260 BF/man hour, which may never be equaled, even with the aid of robotics!
Across town, Larry, of course, had to follow suit, eventually purchasing his own Glide-Away for this straightforward truss work. The result was a staggering amount of truss production capacity that could not be sustained in a not-so-prosperous town of less than 60,000 people. As the loan program business waned, Larry brought in repetitive chicken house truss work from surrounding states to keep his Glide-Away busy. He also tapped into the motel and office construction activity in south Louisiana that resulted from the oil boom, while Dickie pursued the apartment work there.
Dickie had learned how to build and ship large apartment jobs as far as 500 miles while at Rawick. In shipping such distances, it was essential for Dickie to develop strong relationships with large framing contractors, since he had to rely on them to charge reasonable amounts to correct his plant’s mistakes. While supplying jobs in south Louisiana, Dickie got to know framer John Coker well, to the point that Coker encouraged Dickie to partner with him on a joint venture that was closer to all the apartment work. His desire to own his own business compelled 30-year-old Dickie Vail to leave a secure job with a great owner and move his family 250 miles south in a partnership that they named Coker-Vail Components.
The early 1980s were good to both Larry and Dickie as they leveraged their truss expertise to move from employee to owner, and to the privilege of having their name attached to their businesses. In Dickie’s case, his name was listed above Coker’s on the large sign above the Coker-Vail plant, easily visible from Interstate 12 in Hammond, Louisiana. But that distinction would not protect Dickie as he was soon affected by another twist of fate, the same one that affected me.
To Be Continued…
See also