She remembers Winfred Epes as Speedy Epes
What else would a trucker's nickname be other than "Speedy?"
Mary Carter Hackney, 92, of Greensboro, responding to a story in Monday's News & Record about the 75th anniversary of Epes Trucking Co., says she knew company founder Wilfred G. Epes Jr. as Speedy Epes.
She says a little known fact about Speedy was his brother-in-law was Albert Benjamin (Happy) Chandler, the former governor of and U.S. senator from Kentucky. Chandler is best remembered as the commissioner of Major League baseball from 1945-51. During his tenure, he presided over the integration of the Big Leagues when Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Hackney quibbles with an assertion in booklets Epes trucking has published commemorating its anniversary. She has always believed that Speedy Epes founded the business in 1931 not in Blackstone, Va., as the booklets say, but in Blacksburg, Va., home of Virginia Tech.
"I'm sure Speedy and his wife were living in Blacksburg about the time," she says.
The company's history booklet mentions Blacksburg, noting that Epes attended Virginia Tech. He got the idea for starting a trucking company while hitching rides home from Tech to Blackstone with a trucker who hauled tobacco. Epes' father, a promiment businessman in Blackstone, helped his son get started in trucking.
Th company's headquarters was in Blackstone in 1988 when a new owner moved it to Greensboro.
"I might be wrong,'' Carter says of Blacksburg versus Blackstone, "but I have an excellent memory."