Frame’s Motor Freight Shuts After 140 Years in Business

This story appears in the Oct. 12 print edition of Transport Topics.

WEST CHESTER, Pa. — When Frame’s Motor Freight needed a driver to take a load in mid-September from suburban Philadelphia to Lancaster, Pa., President Robert Temple walked downstairs from his office, slid behind the wheel of a 2004 Freightliner and made the delivery.

Now, a few weeks later, Temple, 76, is surrounded by silent tractors and trailers at the tidy West Chester, Pa., headquarters of a company that billed itself as the nation’s oldest trucker, with roots dating to 1870.

Until the Sept. 21 shutdown, taking a last-minute load was routine for Temple, who instead is preparing to auction the less-than-truckload carrier’s equipment next month.

“We were treading water and holding our own until about two years ago,” he said. “Then the division between revenue and expenses got a little wider all the time. Everything else was going up, and freight was going down. You can adjust drivers and re-duce other costs, but you still have to pay the bank. ”

Trucking failures are hardly unique to Frame’s, because nearly 4,000 companies shut down since early 2008, victims of the recession and skyrocketing costs.

Temple, known as “Bud,” got into trucking by marrying Carolyn Wright, the daughter of his predecessor, David Wright.

Wright bought out the Frame family in 1949, nearly eight decades after Clinton Frame began hauling local fruit and vegetables in a horse and wagon about 20 miles to colleges and hospitals in Philadelphia.

It was 1919, Temple said, before Frame’s bought its first motorized piece of equipment. Four years later, it was incorporated as Frame’s Motor Freight and awarded rights to carry freight on three roads between West Chester and Philadelphia, as well as the surrounding townships.

In the 21st century, Frame’s competed in a crowded LTL business, hauling products between northern North Carolina and New Jersey, a congested corridor where tolls ate up 8% of revenue, insurance costs took an even larger bite and fuel costs kept rising.

For a 500-mile shipment, he said, three drivers were needed: one for the linehaul move to and from its other terminal in Richmond, Va., and one for local runs on both ends.

“It just didn’t pay,” he said. “It’s not worth it. I’d been thinking about it [closing down] for a while. There were many sleepless nights. Then [on Sept. 21], I just said, ‘Don’t make any more pickups.’ Within 20 minutes, everyone in the area knew about it.”

When Temple entered the business in 1956, it cost $1.93 for a minimum-weight shipment such as mushrooms from West Chester to Philadelphia. Today, that same load would cost about $70, Temple estimated.

“I started out doing everything that needed to be done — and kept doing it,” Temple said in an interview with Transport Topics last week, mentioning tasks such as driving and working the less-than-truckload carrier’s dock.

Everything, that is, except typing freight bills, a task that for decades fell to his wife Carolyn because Temple chose to avoid learning how to type.

“I’ve never regretted that,” Temple said with a smile. “If I had, I would have worked 18 hours a day instead of 16.”

Temple said Frame’s survived an 18-month strike by the Teamsters union in 1963, managing to stay in business with eight trucks. By the late 1970s, Frame’s expanded by purchasing operating rights from other less-than-truckload carriers.

Temple himself designed a new logo in that decade, drawing the apostrophe in the company’s name as a tractor’s stack with a puff of smoke curling out of it, a detail he dropped after a brief tryout.

By the early 1990s, Frame’s outgrew its 35-door terminal in West Chester, and built a 72-door facility a few hundred yards away, supporting a fleet of 40 tractors and 125 trailers with a peak work force about 130 people.

Temple admitted that he’ll miss the day-to-day rituals such as drinking coffee with drivers before their pre-trip safety inspections, but he’s sure that he won’t miss being awakened at 5 a.m. by a driver calling in to say he won’t be in that morning.

He said he’ll have more time for tennis and golf, especially after the Nov. 12 auction of equipment, now neatly aligned at each terminal door, waiting for a new owner.

Temple praised neighboring truckers who have said they would help to find work for Frame’s workers despite the trying times for trucking.

He’s on the lookout for a fleet to rent the 15-year-old terminal, which has an adjacent shop area that includes portions of a barn built on the property in the early 1800s. Inside is a restored, prized 1950 Autocar that still runs and makes appearances at truck shows.

With the auction looming, that bright red tractor may be the last one to bear a Frame’s logo.

One thing is for sure — you won’t see Temple behind the wheel again.

“It’s a slap in the face to drive someone else’s truck,” he explained.