Ten Turtles to Tucumcari: a Personal History of the Railway Express Agency

Journal of Transport History, The, Sep 2005 by Churella, Albert

Klink Garrett, with Toby Smith, Ten Turtles to Tucumcari: a Personal History of the Railway Express Agency, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque NM (2003), 186 pp., US$27.95.

Before there was Federal Express or UPS there was REA, the Railway Express Agency. Even though it pioneered the techniques employed by today's shippers, it succumbed to the same forces that devastated the US railroad industry following World War II. For nearly fifty years REA exemplified flexibility, dependability, and customer service as it shipped everything from radios to race-horses, from nasturtiums to nuclear weapon components - though never the apocryphal cargo that generated the book's title. Klink Garrett's career, which spanned virtually all of REA's existence, took him from an agency outpost in rural South Dakota to a managerial position in the company's New York headquarters. His largely anecdotal reminiscences, written with the assistance of a professional journalist, provide a quick and entertaining read that nonetheless reveals a great deal about the social and political effects of this transport enterprise.

While railroads have always been extraordinarily efficient at hauling large quantities of undifferentiated commodities over long distances, such efficiencies did not apply to less than carload lot (LCL) traffic. REA bundled shipments into car load lots and consigned other shipments to the care of an on-train messenger, assigned to the express section of a railroad-owned baggage car. Beginning in the 1830s, William H. Harden exploited the speed and dependability of rail transport by serving as a personal courier for valuable and time-sensitive shipments. In true Horatio Alger fashion he rapidly worked his way up from a carpetbag to a sack to a trunk to a wheel-barrow, finally hiring other couriers and establishing national and international routes. Other companies soon emulated his success, thriving thanks to America's decentralised population and its lust for mass-produced consumer goods. Just as the federal government assumed control of the nation's railroads during World War I, so too did it control the express industry, mandating the consolidation of competing firms into the American Railway Express (ARE) as a wartime efficiency measure. The 1920 Transportation Act returned both the railroads and ARE to private control. In 1929 eighty-six railroads purchased ARE, by now reorganised as REA, in order to maintain control over its operations. REA became an indispensable, almost iconic adjunct to life in rural America, its agents held in high esteem by the local community. While Garrett blames REA's downfall on inept management and government-subsidised Parcel Post service, REA also fell victim to high labour costs and the emergence of more efficient distribution systems. The company succumbed to bankruptcy in 1975 (a situation that clearly devastated Garrett), while several top executives went to prison for embezzlement.

REA's history closely paralleled the railroad industry upon which it depended. Both experienced similar regulatory and public policy issues, employed the same technology and organisational structure, embodied an esprit de corps coupled with paternalistic welfare capitalism, blamed the government and the highways for their problems, and coped with soaring labour costs after 1945. Interestingly, the railroad-owned REA moved far more successfully than the railroads themselves into integrated transport by offering coordinated rail-truck-air services.

Garrett does more than simply reminisce about his long and varied career. The authors provide a detailed description of the REA organisation, covering everything from waybill preparation to corporate structure. Historians may find the book overly anecdotal and simplistic (there is a short biography but no footnotes), and it is certainly not a substitute for an as yet unwritten organisational history of the REA. It is a good starting point, however. More important, lay readers will enjoy fascinating stories while being exposed, subtly, to key issues in transport history.

Albert Churella, Southern Polytechnic State University, Marietta GA