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J. Harwood Cochrane Founded One of America’s Top Trucking Companies
He fended off Teamsters, squeezed costs and eventually sold Overnite Transportation for $1.2 billion
J. Harwood Cochrane began his career in the early 1930s and founded Overnite in 1935. PHOTO: UPS FREIGHT
After dropping out of school at 16, J. Harwood Cochrane delivered milk around Richmond, Va., in a horse-drawn wagon. Within a few years, he started a trucking company that helped change the way goods are moved around America.
When Mr. Cochrane began his career in the early 1930s, railroads dominated freight shipments, leaving only the short-haul scraps for truckers lurching down rutted roads in vehicles that regularly broke down.
That changed as trucks became larger and more efficient and the Interstate highways created smooth passages to suburban malls and factories that could be served much faster by truckers than railroads stuck to their fixed rails.
Mr. Cochrane’s Overnite Transportation thrived in periods of both increased and decreased regulation. He fended off the Teamsters union and squeezed costs; his secretary cut used envelopes into note paper that he used for writing memos.
“He was the best trucker of us all,” said Earl Congdon Jr., chairman of Old Dominion Freight Line, another trucking giant with roots in Virginia.
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Mr. Cochrane died July 25 at 103. His wife, Louise, had died in December at 99. They were married for 81 years.
James Harwood Cochrane was born on Nov. 16, 1912, one of seven children in a farm home near Richmond without plumbing. His father, a carpenter, died of pneumonia when Harwood was a teenager. He began delivering milk, starting his shift at 2:05 a.m. He soon took on a second job, delivering fertilizer and household goods in a truck.
The first truck he bought, he later recalled, “broke 27 axles in 41,000 miles. I guess I might have overloaded it a bit.” Tires burst frequently, and drivers had to fix their own trucks.
After getting married on a Saturday evening in 1934, he drove out of Richmond the next morning to deliver cotton sugar bags to New York. He founded Overnite in 1935, choosing that spelling because “Overnight” was already taken. For the first few years, he was the chief driver as well as owner. He sometimes slept in his truck with an oil lantern between his knees for warmth.
The same year he started his business the Interstate Commerce Commission began regulating truckers. Government permission was required to start new routes or change them. Regional rate bureaus, legally protected cartels, set prices, subject to government approval. That helped him by pushing up prices.
His trucks often hauled cigarettes, making them prime targets for thieves. When one stolen Overnite rig was recovered in New Jersey, the driver was found tied up with duct tape in the cab.
World War II created a windfall as trucking firms rushed goods to military bases. Mr. Cochrane began buying small trucking companies, transforming Overnite into a coast-to-coast operator by the 1980s.
Though Overnite was a prime target of Teamsters President James Hoffa, Mr. Cochrane almost entirely shut out unions, partly because he gave workers stock options and spent time with them on the road and in freight terminals.
He initially opposed the deregulation of the early 1980s that made it easier for newcomers to enter the business and allowed more price competition. Soon, though, he found an upside: Unionized rivals with high labor costs began going bust. Mr. Cochrane displayed their logos on a wall at his headquarters under the heading: “Deregulation done ‘em in.” (He wasn’t gloating, he said, but warning employees against complacency.)
To save money, Mr. Cochrane and other Overnite executives shared motel rooms on business trips. “It never made sense to me that you will stay in a car five-feet wide together, and have to have separate rooms at night,” he told Estelle Sharpe Jackson, a biographer.
“He saved every paper clip that ever came into the office,” said John Fain, who was general counsel of Overnite in the 1980s. That frugality “set a powerful example for the rest of us,” Mr. Fain said.
Union Pacific’s takeover offer in 1986 for Overnite, by then a public company, was too rich to turn down. “Everything looked rosy, but it did not work,” Mr. Cochrane later wrote. “The culture was entirely different. Truckers didn’t like railroads; railroads didn’t like truckers.” Union Pacific spun off Overnite in 2003. Two years later, it was acquired by United Parcel Service Inc., which retains the business under its UPS Freight unit.
At age 78, Mr. Cochrane formed a new trucking company, Highway Express. Twelve years later, he sold it to Celadon Group. He later told the Journal of Commerce that Highway Express hadn’t been very profitable and was “nothing to brag about.”
Jack Holmes, who served as president of UPS Freight from 2007 until June of this year, frequently lunched with Mr. Cochrane to tap his wisdom. Mr. Holmes found he needed to prepare for those lunches: “He was grilling me on every competitor, what their competitive position was, and how we were responding to that.”
Mr. Cochrane and his wife made charitable gifts to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, among many other institutions. He donated $1 million to Red Cross relief efforts for Hurricane Katrina in 2005, his family said.
He is survived by two of his four children, eight grandchildren and 15 great grandchildren.
Write to James R. Hagerty at bob.hagerty@wsj.com
