Truckers’ Organization Names Hawaiian National Chairman

Some people find it incongruous that Hawaii, separated from the West Coast by 2,400 miles of open ocean, still is included in the federal interstate highway system.

Maybe some also will find it incongruous that the new national chairman of the American Trucking Assn. is from Hawaii. He is Robert E. Lewis, 52, who was installed recently in Washington, D.C., at a convention attended by 3,800 truckers.

When an editor of the Journal of Commerce asked Lewis how a trucker from the small, isolated 50th state could speak effectively for truckers across the nation, Lewis said that truckers and their problems were pretty much the same everywhere . . . and besides, he will have ATA’s skilled Washington staff to back him up.

Being chairman of ATA means that Lewis will have to leave his firm, American Pacific Transport, pretty much in the hands of assistants for a year.

It is a $2-million business with 52 trucks and 65 employees that he started in 1971. He perceived a need for a company to specialize in local delivery of odd-lot shipments that mainland freight forwarders put together in a single cargo container to get the best possible shipping rates. He works with them to assure effective break-out and delivery on this end.

Earlier, Lewis worked with Seatrain for two years in opening its branches in Hawaii and Guam. Before that he was with Hawaiian Packing and Crating, advancing from claims adjuster to executive vice president.

In the course of this, he served three terms as president of the Hawaii Transportation Assn., which has 225 members. Four years ago HTA nominated him to serve on the national ATA board.

Once there, he was chosen as one of several national vice chairmen. And at the ATA convention in Honolulu in 1985 he was chosen first vice chairman after a couple of seniors stepped aside because of personal business reasons. That put him in position to take the top job this year.