The Dallas Journal, Volume 50, 2004 Page: 65
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Porter William "Pete" Gifford, Sr.
stock in Gifford-Hill. None of the stockholders
was willing to sell any.
Employees Lloyds lasted from 1937 to 1969
when Gifford-Hill & Co. went public. Then the
company had to buy insurance outside, so
Employees Lloyds was liquidated.
In 1937 Dad got the job of building the
Southern Pacific Beltline Railroad around Dallas.
The new track took off from the main Houston &
Texas Central line near Hatcher Street in South
Dallas and went through undeveloped land west
of White Rock Creek and Lake and then north. It
joined the main line again in Richardson. This
enabled Southern Pacific to run trains from
Corsicana around Dallas without going through
the busy Union Terminal.
The same year Dad received the contract to
improve U.S. Highway 75 on Holmes Street in
South Dallas. I worked on this job in the summer
as a timekeeper and bookkeeper. I reported to
Wendall "Deacon" Need, the superintendent. He
taught me a lot, including how to make a payroll
in cash. The highway job lasted about eight
months, but my part lasted only about two and a
half.
During my 1938 summer vacation from
college, I worked on the Dallas Sewage Disposal
Plant. We expanded the number of aeration tanks
and other means of purifying the sewage so the
clean water could be released into the Trinity
River.
In 1939 people in the company realized that
they could save money if they had their own
supply company. The new Coastal Plains Supply
Company would buy products that Giffoird-Hill
needed at wholesale prices and sell them to the
company at retail. The company then decided to
increase its volume by selling to customers
outside the Gifford-Hill group. The company
established warehouses in Dallas and in
Shreveport. These were owned by some of the
company supervisors as well as by the
stockholders. This was a way for supervisors to
share in company profits.
In 1940 the federal government built the
North American Aviation plant in Grand Prairie,
Texas, to supply the British war effort. It was to
manufacture the B-25 bomber that I later serviced
as an aircraft maintenance officer in Abidan, Iran.Gifford-Hill subcontracted all the dirt work,
the gravel cushion and poured the concrete for
this tremendous airplane plant. At North
American we furnished a lot of gravel as a base
under the slabs and we furnished all the concrete
pipe and the ready-mixed concrete for the
construction.
The general contractor on the job was the
Austin Company. By law this work had to be a
union job. Dad formed a new company called
Grand Prairie Construction Co., which did all the
work subcontracted from the general contractor.
Grand Prairie employees were allowed to be
organized by a union but the union would not be
allowed to infiltrate other Gifford-Hill
companies.
During that job Dad had a physical exam at
Samuel Clinic in July 1940. The doctor found
bowel cancer. His good friend Dr. Tommy
Thomason performed surgery right away but
found that the cancer had spread to his liver. He
just sewed him up. In those days they could not
do anything about that type of cancer. (I don't
believe they had radiation or chemotherapy.) Dad
lived six months. Perch Hill ran the company
while Dad was a home and chauffeured him
occasionally to the local jobs. Porter W. Gifford,
Sr., passed away on January 7, 1941, while I was
a senior at Cornell University.
Much of the information that I have put into
this biography came from two old Gifford-Hill
Times magazines published by the personnel
department. One was published in July 1976, and
the other, in July 1986. They featured
photographs of the principal old-timers in the
company and of the old equipment and plants.
Dad always had a big Christmas party to
which he invited the key managers and all the
plant superintendents. It was a great privilege for
a man to be invited to the party. One magazine
has a very good photograph of the
superintendents at one of these parties.
Other information came from "The Gifford-
Hill Story," a presentation that I gave in Houston
to the Newcomers Society in 1968. This was
published by the society. Later we destroyed
many copies of that talk because I referred
repeatedly to the vertical integration of the
aggregate, concrete, and cement companies forThe Dallas Journal 2004 65
The Dallas Journal 2004
65
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Dallas Genealogical Society. The Dallas Journal, Volume 50, 2004, periodical, June 2004; Dallas, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth186863/m1/67/: accessed May 6, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Dallas Genealogical Society.