Making The List At A-P-A
It was a matter of great pride to work for the demanding Arthur Imperatore.
JOHN BENDEL
TEHCNOLOGY EDITOR
They've shut down my alma mater and taken a piece of my heart. My school was A-P-A Transport Corp. of North Bergen, N.J. — a great place to learn if ever there was one.
A-P-A, a regional LTL, closed its doors in February, idling as many as 1,700 workers and more than 800 trucks.
I began driving for A-P-A in 1967 and graduated in a sense six years later. Every A-P-A truck was a classroom, especially the MB Mack straight trucks that made up the bulk of the fleet.
No classroom afforded a better look at the real world of business on the ground. In the days before deregulation and the vast expansion of UPS, thousands of general freight LTL carriers like A-P-A were responsible for most general freight truck transportation.
Driving for A-P-A, you picked up and delivered shoes, specialty groceries, vehicle parts, toys, bags of cocoa beans and lamp black, electronic components, dangerous chemicals, flagpoles, outboard motors, guns, fine lingerie and other commodities too numerous to name.
You saw business through the back door and learned which companies put on a slick face up front but ran shoddy operations behind the facade. You saw great companies that ran right, like A-P-A itself.
In those days A-P-A's founder, president, provost, chancellor and dean of students was a memorable man named Arthur Imperatore, whose list of accomplishments still grows.
Successful trucking entrepreneurs love to think of themselves as legends and Imperatore was no exception. But he accomplished far more in his time than the latter-day legends of deregulation days — at least in my admittedly biased opinion.
During the 1950s and '60s in the densely packed neighborhoods where Imperatore built his small but mighty trucking empire, rigid, often corrupt unions ruled. An overbearing Interstate Commerce Commission stood just beyond the unregulated commercial zone of New York City, ready to prevent any upstart from serving even the nearby suburbs, never mind adjoining states.
Imperatore stood up to unions, honoring contracts but demanding that his workers honor their obligations too. He demanded — and got — an honest day's work for an honest day's pay. Imperatore painstakingly bought into nearby markets, acquiring operating rights from less successful carriers.
He gambled on technology, installing tachographs and hiring technicians to follow up on every run. His security department clipped newspapers throughout A-P-A's operating area and cross-referenced reported arrests with employment applications. Unhappy with quality of job applicants — especially experienced drivers — Imperatore inaugurated an intensive training program long before others.
He sometimes strode his vast loading dock raging, cursing and cowing the unionized dock crew he believed was working too slow.
Imperatore insisted on integrity, commitment and spirit. He once boasted that he fired a driver for slouching across the parking lot to punch out.
Other union people disdained A-P-A drivers. But most of us shrugged off the jibes. It was a matter of great pride to work for the demanding Arthur Imperatore.
Imperatore was not anti-union. He was anti-corruption, anti-abuse and anti-slacker. In my time at A-P-A, drivers worked hard and were paid well.
A-P-A was one of very few union LTLs to survive deregulation and it did so even with Imperatore's primary attentions turned elsewhere. Among other projects in the 1980s and '90s, he built an amazing company called New York Waterways, a ferryboat system with its own proprietary bus line (union, by the way). There is no other system like it and, of course, it is very successful.
It was a dark day when A-P-A closed. Imperatore's adopted son Armand Pohan, A-P-A's president, wrote to employees that he and Imperatore "will always think of this day as the saddest of our lives."
It was a sad day for A-P-A graduates too.
It's been 34 years, but no victory in my memory remains as sweet as that very special one early in 1968 when I made the driver list at A-P-A. And I'll always prize the time I spent — and the degree I believe I earned.
