Legendary Overnite Transportation Founder J. Harwood Cochrane Dies at 103

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Transport Topics  /  July 26, 2016

Trucking legend J. Harwood Cochrane, who entered freight transportation by driving a horse-drawn carriage and founded Overnite Transportation Co. during the Great Depression, died July 25 at 103 in Richmond, Virginia.

UPS Freight, the Richmond-based less-than-truckload carrier that is the successor to Overnite, confirmed Cochrane’s death, which was first reported by the the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Cochrane sold Overnite to Union Pacific Corp. for $1.2 billion in 1986.

“We’re all fortunate to have had Mr. Cochrane around to grow this industry the way he did, and to grow it the right way. All of us at UPS are extremely grateful for everything he accomplished. He had an impact on everyone he met. The industry lost a giant. He is missed,” said Rich McArdle, president of UPS Freight, North America’s fifth-largest LTL carrier and a unit of UPS Inc.

Cochrane’s wife, Louise Odell Banks, died in December at 99 after 81 years of marriage.

“This is a sad day for trucking in Virginia,” said Dale Bennett, president of the Virginia Trucking Association.

Cochrane was a legend within the state, Bennett said, for his longevity, his business skill and his post-retirement philanthropy — to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Baptist groups, the Red Cross, and toward financing the digging of wells for drinking in Africa.

He rose to great wealth from the most humble beginnings, having quit high school at 16 to find work after his father died. Cochrane’s first transportation job was delivering milk for Virginia Dairy with the help of Charlie the horse. That was in 1929, the year the Great Depression started.

With the help of his brother Calvin, the two men ran Cochrane Transportation from 1930 to 1934.
The year after the brothers went their separate ways, Harwood founded Overnite with one tractor, one trailer and one straight truck. That was also the year the Interstate Commerce Commission began the regulation of trucking.

As part of a 2010 profile in Transport Topics, Cochrane described the discipline and thrift that allowed him first to survive and then prosper during the Depression. He slept in a day cab, curled up with an oil heater for warmth.

Overnite became publicly traded in 1957. It was highly profitable despite an epic labor relations battle with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

Cochrane said he tried to run Overnite as a family, encouraging employees to recruit their relatives as new employees.

Bennett said Cochrane also gave out Overnite stock to employees and when the company was sold to Union Pacific, many of them became rich.
Cochrane said one of his favorite pieces of memorabilia was a photo of a check for $359,000 written in 1963 to Overnite and signed by the late Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa to satisfy a judgment against the union and in favor of the trucking company.

At the time of the sale to Union Pacific, Cochrane was tremendously wealthy, but he kept working. He remained with Overnite as its chairman for four years, until 1990.

Then he switched to the truckload side of the industry by starting Highway Express at 78. Cochrane ran that company until 2003, when he sold it to Celadon Group.

The sales contract included a five-year noncompete clause, even though Cochrane was nearly 91 then, so he retired from daily trucking.

Earl Congdon, chairman of LTL carrier Old Dominion Freight Line, said in the 2010 profile that Cochrane is “probably the greatest LTL trucker of us all.” ODFL started in Richmond and briefly shared a terminal with Overnite.
Bennett said he and Cochrane spoke regularly about trucking after the Highway Express sale. Cochrane also developed a relationship with Jack Holmes, McArdle’s predecessor at UPS Freight.

“Mr. Cochrane built the envy of the trucking industry while dealing with the Great Depression, deregulation and an antiquated system of granting privileges to service states. He was a hero to many who are still part of the UPS Freight family,” Holmes said.

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J. Harwood Cochrane, trucking magnate and arts benefactor, dies at 103

The Richmond Times-Dispatch  /  July 26, 2016

Richmond trucking entrepreneur J. Harwood Cochrane launched his transportation career delivering milk in a horse-drawn wagon.

Decades later, he remembered a key element of his time at Virginia Dairy:

“I went to work at five minutes to 2 (a.m.) for years and years,” Mr. Cochrane said in a 2014 interview. “That’s pretty early.”

Early — or long — hours didn’t seem to be a deterrent for Mr. Cochrane, who went on to build a trucking empire. Over the years, he and his wife, Louise, also became known for turning their good fortune into millions for the arts and other community organizations.

Mr. Cochrane died Monday at age 103. His wife died in December at 99. They were married for 81 years.

“It’s a sad day for Richmond and for Virginia,” said Alex Nyerges, director of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, which has been a beneficiary of the Cochranes’ generosity over the years.

“From the first time I can remember meeting him to the last time I saw him, probably in the last year, he looked to me like he stepped out of Hollywood casting,” said James E. Ukrop, former chairman and CEO of Ukrop’s Super Markets.

“Such a dapper dresser, white hair and mustache. They were just a beautiful couple.”

Added Ukrop, “He was quite the entrepreneur.”

Mr. Cochrane was only 21 when he left Virginia Dairy during the Great Depression to jump into the fledgling trucking industry in 1933.

He traded in his Ford car for a Chevrolet tractor and trailer, and he and a brother started hauling freight from Richmond to Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York.

Mr. Cochrane pawned whatever he could — jacks, spare tires and wheels, rear tires, his watch — to purchase gasoline on his return trips home, and he survived on the bread, bologna and jar of mayonnaise he carried with him.

He acknowledged years later that he probably hauled loads that were too heavy — the tractor broke 27 axles in 41,000 miles — and for a nine-month stretch in 1934, he drove a truck that had no brakes or fourth gear. He also acknowledged that “things weren’t going well,” so he set off on his own.

In 1935, he founded Overnite Transportation. He intended the name to be “Overnight,” but he discovered a Baltimore company already had that name, so he went with “Overnite.”

At the outset, he wasn’t fueled by a desire to get rich. He simply wanted to do better every day, he said, and to be able to afford to buy two new tires at a time when he needed them or — if he really dared to dream — four tires.

His business grew, and he began acquiring other carriers, which led him into other parts of the country and which also increased his role in the industry.

He would advise U.S. presidents on the early interstate highway system, because he had grown weary of driving trucks on treacherous “dirt and gravel roads” across the country, his grandson, Chris Gilman, said Tuesday.

By 1986, he had built Overnite into such a transportation empire that the railroad giant Union Pacific Corp. made an unsolicited offer. Though Mr. Cochrane was reluctant to sell, he finally agreed for the good of his shareholders, bringing in a whopping sale price of $1.2 billion.

Mr. Cochrane stayed on as chairman and CEO, though he eventually was replaced as CEO and retired as chairman.

In 1991, at age 79 and at the conclusion of a five-year non-compete clause, he purchased a 64-acre plot a block from Overnite’s terminal on Midlothian Turnpike and founded another trucking company, Highway Express.

“When I sold Overnite, I had to do a lot of adjusting,” he said in a 2003 interview. “You go from a corporate culture where jet planes are always available, and the next week you’re pumping your own gas. You have culture shock, really. I just thought I’d miss that plane like I missed breakfast.”

The new company thrived, though it never reached the size of Overnite, and he sold it in 2003.

Bryce Powell, a Midlothian-based real estate developer who served on Overnite’s board, said in a 2003 interview: “Certainly when you look at Richmond businessmen in the 20th century, he has one of the most unique and remarkable stories from where he started and what he created. Overnite’s economic impact on Richmond has been tremendous.”

Nancy Earnhardt, his secretary of 45 years, put it this way in a 2003 interview: “He worked so hard, and he made so much money, and he gave it all away.”

Mr. Cochrane had a knack for hiring smart people but, from the beginning, Powell said, “Harwood epitomized Overnite. The company was a manifestation of his values and work ethic.”

Mr. Cochrane said that just because he had a working life that lasted nearly eight decades, it didn’t make him a workaholic.

“I don’t work hard,” he said. “I just work regular.”

Born on Nov. 16, 1912, Mr. Cochrane grew up in Goochland County with six brothers and sisters in a home without plumbing or central heat.

He dropped out of high school at age 16 and came to Richmond after his father died of pneumonia. His mother operated a soup kitchen in South Richmond.

He met his future wife on a blind date — though not with each other — and they found time to court around the odd hours required of his milk-delivery job.

They were married in 1934 in a ceremony in the parlor of the home of Tabernacle Baptist Church’s pastor. That evening, they ate dinner at the home of Harwood’s mother and then went to the movies.

By 2014, they had forgotten the film but thought it was at the old Loew’s Theater at North Sixth and East Grace streets, which would have been pretty much perfect: They celebrated their 80th anniversary that year with a musical party for 1,000 people that featured the Richmond Symphony with Steven Smith conducting, the Richmond Symphony Women’s Chorus, Richmond Ballet and assorted soloists at the Carpenter Theatre, which was, in its first life, the Loew’s.

The symphony was one of many community groups to experience the kindness of the Cochranes.

“They were giants of philanthropy in the city and so deeply committed to making the symphony and its programs accessible to the next generation,” said David Fisk, the symphony’s executive director. “Just a lovely man to spend time with.”

They also often attended the symphony, which was a theme of their philanthropy: They were not just donors but also participants. The Cochranes often went to events at such places as the VMFA and Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden.

“That’s the part that’s going to be most noticeable … (their) support in terms of enthusiasm, participation and attendance,” VMFA’s Nyerges said.

“Harwood was here as recently as our former board member dinner in late June. We sat down and had a fabulous conversation. For me personally, he’s been a role model of determination and perseverance, both as a business leader and as a person.”

Nyerges said the impact of the Cochranes’ generosity “fills the American galleries. We have paintings and sculptures and works on paper that have been purchased with funds from the Cochrane endowment.” Nyerges said the endowment was established in 1988 with a $5 million gift and has grown to almost $40 million.

The Cochranes gave money to churches, schools and museums. They contributed to efforts to dig wells in Africa and to build a public library in their Hanover County community of Rockville.

In the days after Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast in 2005, Mr. Cochrane dropped off an envelope to the local Red Cross chapter for Katrina aid. It was a check for $1 million.

In addition to his grandson, Mr. Cochrane is survived by a son, James Harwood Cochrane Jr., and a daughter, Judith Cochrane Gilman-Hines, both of Henrico County; and seven other grandchildren and 15 great-grandchildren. A daughter, Suzanne Hope Cochrane Austell Martin, died in 2009; another daughter, Treena Louise Cochrane, died in infancy. One grandchild also preceded him in death.

Visitation for Mr. Cochrane will be held Friday from 2 to 4 p.m. and 6 to 9 p.m. at Woody Funeral Home, 1771 N. Parham Road. Mr. Cochrane was a former owner of the funeral home chain.

A funeral will be held Saturday at 11 a.m. at Tabernacle Baptist Church, 1925 Grove Ave.

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Overnite Transportation Founder Cochrane, 97, Still Consulted Frequently for His Sage Advice

Transport Topics  /  September 13, 2010

RICHMOND, Va. — People in trucking have long viewed themselves as a collection of hardworking individuals — and there are plenty of stories to support that belief. But who among them has worked harder and longer than J. Harwood Cochrane, founder of the highly successful Overnite Transportation Co. at age 22 and the more middling Highway Express at age 78?

What soul singer James Brown was to show business, Cochrane has been to trucking — the hardest working man in the industry.

Cochrane will turn 98 in November and walks with the assistance of a cane after he broke a hip earlier this year. But he still follows trucking from his spacious apartment in a well-heeled retirement community here, ponders mergers and acquisitions, and offers advice to the president of UPS Freight, Overnite’s successor, at a monthly lunch.

“He’s probably the greatest LTL trucker of us all,” said Earl Congdon, chairman of Old Dominion Freight Line, Thomasville, N.C. “I used Overnite as a pattern for Old Dominion. We tried to do the same thing, but we were 15 to 20 years behind him.”

Cochrane is a thrifty — some say, cheap — man, who grew up in rural poverty, left high school without graduating so he could work, started a business during the Great Depression that is still around, amassed a nine-figure fortune and now has given most of it away to finance causes ranging from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts to wells that provide drinking water for poor African villages.

His first power unit in freight transportation had just one horsepower, and that horse’s name was Charlie. He pulled Cochrane’s Virginia Dairy milk wagon through the streets of Richmond, the state’s capital city. Early on, Cochrane drove poor-quality trucks because, he said, he couldn’t afford premium vehicles.

He slept in his sleeperless cab, curled up with an oil heater for warmth. Later, he pushed for standardization in tractor and trailer design. He took Overnite public in 1957 and led it onto the New York Stock Exchange five years later. He spent years fighting off Teamsters organizing campaigns and collected judgments against the union.

He sold Overnite, a less-than-truckload carrier, to railroad holding company Union Pacific Corp. in 1986 for $1.2 billion. His truckload venture, Highway Express, didn’t work as well. But when he sold it to Celadon Group in 2003 at age 91, he still had to sign a five-year noncompete agreement.

Cochrane follows trucking and tends to his investments with the help of Nancy Earnhardt, his now part-time secretary, who has worked for him for 52 years.

“I did everything wrong. I bought the wrong trucks, the wrong tires and trailers. I survived on determination and hard work,” Cochrane said as he reviewed his career during a recent interview here. He seems to have learned from his mistakes, though, and the industry’s events have kept his mind active for roughly 80 years.

“I dream of mergers at night,” Cochrane said, adding that he doesn’t want to engineer them but that he naturally tends to speculate on the subject after having pulled off 56 of them during his Overnite years. His current favorite idea involves three regional carriers, all based in the East, forming a triple combination.

“Those three would make a perfect combination, although they’d have to close 50 to 70 terminals,” he said. He has long thought LTL consolidation will continue, he said, until there are only about eight very large carriers left.

Looking at other operations, Cochrane said he thinks Congdon’s Old Dominion is “well run.” On the truckload side, he also respects Heartland Express’ operations but wonders why the stock hasn’t done better lately, especially because Knight Transportation has.

Cochrane’s heart may be in trucking, but as an investor, his head is not.

“I would choose another industry before trucking as an investor,” he said. “If the company isn’t union now, there’s the threat of it.”

C.H. Robinson Worldwide, the nation’s largest freight broker, worries him as a trucker but intrigues him as an investor.

“They really take a high percentage [of the freight bill as a fee], but I’m tempted to buy some stock.”

He also said the Con-way Inc. model of offering large-scale LTL and truckload services has great merit because of the opportunity to cross-sell to a single customer base.

“The two services fit together quite nicely,” he said.

“The first official action I took,” said UPS Freight President Jack Holmes, who has had the job as Cochrane’s successor since 2007, “was to establish a UPS Freight Leadership Hall of Fame. We inducted Leo Suggs, Gordon Mackenzie and Mr. Cochrane.”

Suggs ran Overnite from 1996 to 2006, and Mackenzie was in charge between Suggs and Holmes, in 2006-07.

It was Cochrane’s second Hall of Fame appearance. He was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame in Dearborn, Mich., in 1991.

After Cochrane sold his ownership stake to the railroad in 1986, he stayed for four more years as a hired manager. His immediate successor, Union Pacific executive Thomas Boswell, did not get along with him.

“He disliked me with a passion,” Cochrane said.

Boswell asked him to leave in 1990, and Cochrane did. The next year, he started truckload carrier Highway Express. He ran that business for a dozen years until he sold it to Celadon.

“I thought I had lost money on it, but after the final tax return was done, I found that I’d made $2 million. That wasn’t much money relative to all of the revenue involved, but it was nice to know that I didn’t lose anything,” Cochrane recalled.

Holmes said the railroad removed Cochrane’s portrait from the lobby of the company’s headquarters here, “but I put it back up.”

Holmes said he has been talking to Cochrane regularly since 2008, and it’s not just to be polite to an old man.

“As it became obvious the economy was suffering and slipping away in 2008, I had to figure out what would be our approach,” Holmes said. “Harwood Cochrane was the only guy I knew who managed an LTL company through a worse economy. He survived the Great Depression.

“He told me, ‘You have to count every nickel,’ and take control of the expense side. If you don’t take expenses down, he said, the customers will get caught in the middle as the revenue drops.”

“I’ve got very selfish reasons for meeting with him,” Holmes said.

In 1989, Overnite published a biography of Cochrane that tells his life story through the Union Pacific sale. Estelle Sharpe Jackson, who wrote about Cochrane for Virginia Business magazine, provides a useful chronology of his life and some compelling anecdotes.

Cochrane had six siblings who survived to adulthood. For much of his childhood, their mother stayed with the children on a farm outside of town while Cochrane’s father worked construction in Michigan and sent back money. The elder Cochrane died at age 56, when Harwood was 16, shortly before the Depression started.

The first job that he liked was the dairy job, but that was just his day job, according to Jackson’s “Mr. Cochrane’s Overnite.” He and his brother Calvin started Cochrane Transportation in 1933 to move furniture, groups of people and anything else around town.

Success in trucking was not inevitable for the family. The brothers split at the end of 1934, with Harwood starting Overnite in January 1935 and Calvin keeping the name Cochrane Transportation.

The two brothers did not want to compete with each other, Harwood Cochrane said, so he hauled freight in Virginia and North Carolina with nonunion labor, whereas Calvin looked north toward Washington, Baltimore and Philadelphia and worked with unionized employees.

Calvin Cochrane’s company went out of business before 1940, however, and he returned to farming for a living.

Harwood Cochrane said he got his first big break after the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. In 1942, he began hauling freight for the Marine Corps from Philadelphia to North Carolina. It was lots of steady business.

The other work that helped to stabilize Overnite in the 1940s and made it profitable and durable was hauling cigarettes, Cochrane said. Philip Morris Inc. and R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. were both frequent sources of freight.

Casting about carefully for the  right word, Old Dominion’s Congdon called Cochrane “thrifty.” Others, speaking on the condition of anonymity, went straight for “cheap.”

Congdon said Cochrane, like most businessmen in the 1950s, did not like the Korean War-era tax that collected 90% of profits and left only one dime out of every dollar with companies.

“A White Trucks dealer was trying to sell him trucks and emphasized that point,” said Congdon. “Harwood replied, ‘Yes, but I want that dime.’ He was a light tipper. He’d tip 10% when I tipped 15%. But he was also a philanthropist who gave away much of his fortune.”

Cochrane saw enough of life’s difficulties, even at an early age, to know that nothing was easy. There was the poverty of his youth, even before his father died and the Depression started. There was Calvin’s business failure in trucking.

LTL carriers started folding in large numbers in the 1980s because they could not adjust to deregulation. Cochrane bought some of their signs and fastened them to a wall at one of his terminals to remind employees that no one is ever completely safe.

“Hundreds of days could have been my last ones in business,” Cochrane recalled. “I didn’t have money to pay bills.”

He had to learn both ends of the business, finance and operations. He shopped carefully for terminals, often snapping up real estate from failed competitors in exchange for ready cash.

“I always looked at what was available when a company went out of business,” he said. “When you’re going bankrupt, you want money right quick. I had lousy terminals to begin with and wanted better.”

He also prized modern tractors and trailers with easily replaceable parts that could be operated efficiently.

“I’ve seen changes of every size and shape,” he said. “Trailers weren’t easily interchanged when I started. There were different types of fifth wheels, and light connectors usually had to be cut and respliced. There were no uniform fifth wheels and light plugs.”

Cochrane said one of the most important things he ever did for trucking was to get together with management from Yellow Freight System, Roadway Express, Consolidated Freightways and Carolina Freight to urge Fruehauf Trailers to manufacture a standard trailer that all of those carriers would buy.

Cochrane’s committee gave detailed advice on landing gear, fifth wheels, king pins and electrical hookups.

“We got to 97% of a trailer,” he said, before things fell apart, but the work was picked up by others and led to greater standardization.

“It was a great service to the industry, I think.”

As a result of his obsession over operational efficiency, Overnite was one of the industry’s most profitable carriers, often producing operating ratios — expenses as a percentage of revenue — in the 80s, which is considered a sterling measure of financial performance.

An important part of the financial side for Cochrane was his strong bias against unionized labor. Having observed early on that life often can be difficult and that success is never guaranteed, Cochrane knew only one way to run his company: work fiendishly hard as much as you can; give customers whatever they want whenever you can; and make sure your employees work hard, too.

A couple of incidents related to union work rules made up his mind. As related in Jackson’s biography and confirmed in an interview, Cochrane did sign a Teamsters contract in the 1940s because of the Southern Biscuit Co., a major shipper with unionized employees who wouldn’t tend to Cochrane’s trucks because his employees weren’t union members.

Cochrane signed a labor contract, and shortly thereafter, a fight ensued. A local Teamsters leader wanted Cochrane to fire an executive, but Cochrane wouldn’t — because the man in question did not work for Overnite but for another company instead. Picketing and interruptions took place until Cochrane could prove the man worked elsewhere.

“Afterward, they laughed and said I should forgive and forget. I told them I could forgive, but I’d never forget,” he said.

Another time, he was delayed significantly while moving 3,700 pounds of freight at a newly purchased New Orleans terminal because the necessary employee for freight handling was not around and an available employee on site was not allowed to do that job, he said.

Among Cochrane’s memorabilia are two photos of checks from 1963. One, for more than $359,000, was signed by Jimmy Hoffa, the late union president. The other is from liquidating a Teamsters union hall in Charlotte, N.C., to satisfy a judgment against the union in favor of Overnite.

Cochrane said he is not happy that his old company now uses Teamsters union employees. He and Holmes talked about the 2008 switch to representation. Cochrane said he’s concerned that UPS Freight will not be as agile in serving customer needs. Holmes said UPS has been working with the Teamsters union for about 80 years on the package side and that UPS managers know how to work well with Teamsters employees.

Cochrane didn’t just shut out the union by fiat. He convinced his employees to vote against representation elections by providing steady employment, encouraging employees to get their relatives to work for Overnite, providing a well-funded retirement fund, offering stock ownership to employees and taking an interest in their personal lives.

“He engrained a culture into the organization that was family-oriented,” said Leo Suggs, the one-time Overnite boss and now chairman and CEO of Greatwide Logistics Services, Dallas. “After he left [in 1990], it was much less personal. He had the commitment of people in the organization . . . and it was a hardworking group.”

Suggs said he took the lesson on corporate culture to heart and has tried to replicate it with Greatwide. He had not met Cochrane before becoming one of his successors, Suggs said, but he called him up and found him happy to talk.

“He encouraged nepotism. He wanted employees to want their sons and daughters to work there,” Suggs said. “He viewed Overnite as his family, and it was the most successful trucking company in America when he sold it. He loved the company and its employees, and it was mutual.

“He didn’t sit behind his desk in his office. He went out with drivers and dockworkers,” Suggs added. “He learned that mutual respect and a willingness to share was the road map for a successful company. If employees know they have job security and good equipment, they feel better and do more for customers. That makes for better business. It’s a full circle and he reinforced it.”

Cochrane no longer has a company to run. With Earnhardt’s help, he tends to his investments and follows events in trucking. Despite difficulty with his hip, he feeds the ducks at his community pond.

While extremely comfortable, his fortune is much smaller.

“I’ve given away about 75% of my holdings,” he said, and he estimated the value of the cash, stock and real estate given away to be more than $100 million.

His wife, Louise, is a great lover of art, and so he has given $37 million to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, including the Louise and Harwood Cochrane Atrium and the Harwood and Louise Cochrane Fund for American Art.

He’s also donated to Baptist groups, the American Red Cross, the University of Richmond and Randolph College in Lynchburg — formerly Randolph-Macon Woman’s College.

Although the poverty of his youth spurred him to great financial success at Overnite, hoarding cash was never the point, Cochrane said.

“I wanted to do things better,” he noted. “It’s not so much that I wanted to be rich, but I wanted better trucks, better tires and better terminal buildings. I always want a way to do something better.”

 

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Local couple married for over 80 years

ABC News  /  February 19, 2015

Being married for 50 years is reason to celebrate.  It’s almost unheard of to be married for 75 years.  Here in Richmond, though, there is a love story more than eight decades in the making.

In 1934, Franklin Roosevelt was President, the US was in the midst of the Great Depression, and Richmond’s Louise and Harwood Cochrane got married.  Now they are just weeks away from their 81st wedding anniversary.

“I can’t believe that.  I don’t count the years anymore,” says Louise from her home on the North Side.  It’s not even a mile from where she and Harwood first lived when they got married.

When you get the two of them talking, you are taken back to 1930’s Richmond.  She was a teenager from Halifax.  He was a milk delivery man with Hanover roots, three years her Senior.

“We met on a blind date.  He had a date with my friend and brought his cousin along and I dated his cousin,” says Louise, now 99.  “The next day he called me, wanted to see me again,” she recalls, explaining, “In those days, men did the calling, not girls and he called me and asked me for a date.  That’s how we met, and it began to grow from that.”

In those early days, there were double dates and flights over Richmond.  On the ground, there was courting at Bill’s Barbecue.  On March 31, 1934, they made it official with a simple wedding in the minister’s parlor at Tabernacle Baptist Church.

“He was starting a business so he had to go out of town the next morning to Philadelphia, so we couldn’t go anywhere couldn’t have a honeymoon.  He promised me a honeymoon and he’s still promising it.  We haven’t had it yet,” Louise chuckles.

“I’m still working on it,” jokes Harwood, who is now 102.

There was no official honeymoon during their humble beginnings, but what evolved was a marriage filled with life!  In 1935, Harwood founded Overnite Transportation, the first of his two trucking companies.  It was a billion-plus dollar business.  The wealth afforded the Cochranes opportunities like no other, including trips.

“Quite a few.  Gracious, we went to so many exciting places,” Louise recalls.  One trip they especially remember was a flight around the world on the Concord.

“You only have one life.  That’s it.  So you do the best you can with what you have.  Don’t you say so?”  Louise asks looking at her husband.  “So,” he answers while she laughs at his brevity.

Along with the experiences, they were a family.  Three daughters, seven grandchildren and twelve great-grandchildren have since followed, but the Cochranes never stopped working on just the two of them.

“It’s a two-way game.  You can’t always have your way.  Sometimes let him have his way,” Louise explains their key to longevity.  “And you’ll have some rough times ahead.  We did, but you live through it.  That makes you a little bit stronger, I think.”

Even in those tough times, like losing a daughter, the Cochranes have been driven by a deep sense of philanthropy.  Over the years, they have supported several Richmond landmarks, including the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

“We felt like that was a place when we had some money to give away that everybody could enjoy.  School children, adults, Black and White.  Everybody could enjoy the museum, so it’s still one of our projects.”

The Cochranes have a passion for art.  Louise still paints in her home studio as often as she can.  She has an exhibition at Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens this month and is planning for one at VMFA next year for her 100th birthday.  After all these years, the Cochranes still share so much.

“We enjoy the opera, we enjoy the symphony.  We have our same seats at Center Stage,” says Louise.  “When you get to be our age, it’s hard to find fun.  It’s fun just living, I guess. We go to church, go for a ride in the country every Sunday after church.  We enjoy that kind of a thing, but we don’t really take trips anymore.”

Unless you count those trips down memory lane.  There are still plenty of those.

“Are you happy you stayed with me?” Louise asks Harwood, taking his arm.

“I’m a happy man,” he says simply.

They are happy and together for 81 years of marriage and counting!  There is still so much they still want to do.

“I’d like to get on the Queen Mary and go somewhere.  Maybe I will yet, who knows?” Louise thinks of one item on her bucket list.  “Anything you’d like to do that you haven’t done?” she prompts Harwood.

“There are a few people I’d like to punch in the nose,” he jokes, while his wife laughs.

They still have plenty of laughter, love and life with each other.

“I just think we belong together now,” says Louise.

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J. Harwood Cochrane was a living legend in the trucking industry. He was the best of the best.

I dare say, Mr. Cochrane was the all-time most brilliant and respected man in America's freight industry. 

In meeting the sales and after-sales requirements of Overnite Transportation, the Richmond factory branch of the former Mack Trucks Inc. was one of the best in the nation. Like all Mack factory branches, it was the pedigreed Mack family of people who "made the difference" in Richmond for our very loyal Virginia customers (as Zenon Hansen often pointed out).

[DailyDiesel]

There was a nice profile of the man and company in one the most recent Wheels of Times. Rest in Peace!