You all know the gist of the story. It's been told a million times by each of the four Kemp boys. The story of California Delivery Service, the trucking company started by Paul Kemp Sr. and his younger brother, Jack B. (For reference, Jack B. is Paul Sr.'s brother and Jack F. is Paul Sr.'s son.)
Jack F. put the story in more than one of his political speeches over the years. I liked it best when he described the naming of the company as "audacious!" Here's a brief summary compiled from a few speeches of his:
FROM JACK F:
I learned about free enterprise from my dad. He was a truck driver who, after a good year of wages, put a second mortgage on our Los Angeles home in the 1930's and bought a truck.
He had one truck and dared to start a company and call it The California Delivery Service.
With the profits from his burgeoning delivery service, he bought a fleet of 12 new trucks and hired more drivers. From Dad I learned my first lesson in free enterprise: Truck drivers' wages are higher when they have trucks to drive than when they don't.
What CDS did to grow was to invest in labor and make the capital expenditures designed to produce profits and get a good return on investment. It worked then and it works now.
After a question from John Brock, Uncle Paul had been thinking about the company recently and wrote down some of his recollections. Most of this I'd never heard. It's all wonderful.....
FROM PAUL JR. -
Dad's business started in the early-mid '30's as California Delivery Service (CDS).
Dad and Jack were not your gutsy entrepreneurs as we worship these days. They had bought their brother Willard's motorcycle business out of bankruptcy the hard way, by paying off all the creditors over a period of many years.
Paul Sr., Jack, and Willard Kemp
So by necessity, they then gradually converted their motorcycle inventory into delivery vehicles and soon began to use trucks in addition to the three-wheeled vehicles.
An example of a motorcycle delivery sidecar
In 1937 they bought a fleet of ten Ford trucks and expanded during the war with five Ford '31 sedans stripped of all their upholstery and all but the driver's seat. Those were all they could find during the war.
1937 Ford truck
As the war began its last phases, I turned sixteen in '44 and Dad and Jack gave me one of these '31 Ford sedans for my first car. We had to find the seats to put back in it.
1931 Ford sedan
Sometime in 1945 the right rear engine mount broke off the frame and the fly wheel housing was then resting on the main transverse brake rod.
So every time you put the brakes on you would raise the engine several inches and it would scream bloody murder and the fan sometimes would hit the back of the radiator.
All of us in Hollywood High class of Spring '46 thought that was a real hoot and we used it as a delivery vehicle for school party decorations and student bus driving all over Hollywood.
Hollywood High School
One morning as I was going to school I drove to the right around a big red Pacific Electric street car train as it was unloading students who were crossing over to the sidewalk.
Pacific Electric Red Car
I honked and yelled and everybody booed and yelled and I then swung left around the train onto Sunset Blvd and down to the Hollywood High parking lot.
As I got out of the Ford, a California Highway patrolmen drove up behind me and gave me a huge lecture and a ticket for my illegal passing on the right, through the pedestrians, and an illegal left turn from the right lane.
He then inspected the car and found the broken motor mount and gave me another lecture in front of a growing crowd of Hollywood High students there in the parking lot.
After bawling me out he goes back to his cruiser and pulls out a yellow sign which he glues to my windshield forbidding the car to be driven on California highways.
The crowd cheered, I looked embarrassedly stunned, and my first Ford went then to the great automotive cemetery. Dad had to pay to haul the car away and a friend had to drive me home later that day.
I had proved once again that brains are hard to come by in some teenagers. I had to work a long time to pay off the ticket and the tow charges.
So, the picture and your query nurtured my nostalgia for California Delivery Service and it's stories. There's a million of them. All of my brothers have their funny CDS stories.
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AND MORE FROM PAUL:
Maple Street is where they built their own building with loading docks.....a big step up for them as they load and unload trucks. Both Dad and Jack would work their heads off loading and unloading trucks like stevedores..........and all of us brothers in the same fashion. Most of the action happened between 11:30 AM and 12:30 to 1:00 PM. All of the trucks would go out in the morning for pickups in the downtown area and would return late in the morning loaded with stuff. Everyone would then chip in to unload and distribute the shipments to the proper dock for loading the delivery trucks (same trucks). After loading the trucks would head out to the outlying towns like Pasadena, Long Beach, Glendale, Burbank, Santa Monica, etc.
The loads were sometimes really heavy......we all dreaded shipments of batteries....man were they heavy to load and unload. Big fenders, mufflers with tail pipes, engine blocks, all kind of car parts, stationery, tiny rubber stamps, big carpets, boxes of perfumes and cosmetics. Electric blankets, socks, we all had free socks and shorts and blankets for years and years from damaged boxes that were never delivered. It was huge joke in the family that we all had socks and shorts and other stuff that we boys never cared much about but had in great quantities. I’m sure the parents loved the windfall.
In the evening some of the trucks would go home with the trusted older veteran drivers and the rest would come back to the docks for the night............and repeat every day the same routines. Pickups in the morning from customers (who paid for delivery of their stuff) and delivery in the afternoon to the outlying towns and cities.
Drivers were “Jonesy”, “Boisie,” “Crazy Bill,” “Wild Will,” and on and on. Uncle Sandy (Clarence) drove a truck for CDS for a few years during the depression depths. Probably ‘35 or ‘36 or so.
CDS was finally granted after years of legal haggling by Dad’s lawyer a designation invented for companies like his, a “Radial Common Carrier.”
UPS and others fought like tigers to keep smaller competitors from being granted the full franchise of “Common Carriers” and the legal bills for Dad and Jack must have been terribly taxing. Their beloved lawyer was MacIntryre Fairies. I’m sure he did much of the work “pro CDS bono” so to speak just out of love for Dad, and maybe Jack. This lawyer later became a rather famous judge, may be justice. I recall they were several times threatened with having to cease and desist from the business by titled competitors. it was this lawyer who at lease partly saved the businesses for the smaller fry like CDS. It was pretty dramatic and both Dad and Jack and mother believed it was a major demonstration to have this ruling go their way. I think it happened in the late 40’s during Tom’s and my time at SC. It had been a long and tense battle for the “upstarts” crowding in the trucking world.
The CDS unionization story is another fascinating element.........again led my the UPS unionized drivers. We’ll save that for another bout of this stuff.
In each of these locations Dad and Jack would have desks up against each other facing each other and there was “stuff” stacked and stuffed all over the place. Dad would handle the customer calls and Jack would do the dispatching and routing. He was a genius at it. But people would call and complain about not having their badly needed delivery and Jack would say “it’s on the truck and on its way” and sometimes mother would have to run down and pick it up and deliver it, or they would jump in the car and deliver it way out somewhere themselves in person to keep the customer happy. This happened often and Jack was famous amongst us for saying “it’s on the truck right now on it’s way to your door” and we would laugh out loud as this would happen but face it, he was guilty of some gross fibs weekly when this happened. It was, unfortunately, common place.
Dad and Jack were never very good at managing their paper work and they were forever frantically fumbling around searching for bills of lading and other documents in the office. The office was usually a mess of stacks of papers and stuff all over the place. Now and then Dad would get mad and spend a lot of time organizing it and straightening it our only to have it eventually return to a mess. In later years I remember he kept it straight and loved it.
In the Main Street building it began as the Motorcycle business with a showroom in front, a large shop and parking area, a large machine shop in the back which was dark and greasy with huge machines standing around in it with wide belts up to a series of shafts up in the ceiling that were in turn belted to a shaft in the corner belted to a huge black motor that would turn the whole shop into action all at once when they threw a switch.
Dad and Jack’s office was over to the side of this shop. Outside of this office over on the wall was the Western Union telegraph switch that summoned the delivery boys on bicycles. (I described my introduction to this as a child in a message to Dick a couple of years ago.) They had a two-way speaker system called a “VoyCall” that they installed between their office and the large shop and parking floor. At my repeated requests Dad brought this home to me years later and I used it with the neighborhood gang for a year or so and pretty well banged it up although it still worked when Dad retrieved it. Jack was pretty angry at my having this thing to play with since it was so expensive to buy. I think this thing with its vacuum tube amplifier and switches and knobs were what got me so focused on electronic things when I was a child. But the phone company visit capped it off.
VoyCall intercom c. 1930
Later, I believe it was in ‘37 or ‘38 that my Sunday School Teacher Ernie Schreiber who was a leading engineer for the the Bell Telephone Company in those days took us on a long tour of the phone switching center downtown at about 5th and Hill Streets which totally blew me away for a lifetime. All of those seemingly miles of switches and cords and lights with the operators up on tall stools all talking at once and the supervisors on roller skates rolling around helping where needed. I’ve never been the same since. And there were huge rooms of stacks and stacks of electrical rotating stepping switches clacking away in a horrendous din that were totally riveting to me.
These were the automatic dialing switches that you would activate as you dialed numbers and letters on the face of the rotary phones in those days. There was a switch for each letter and number in the phone number. Ours in Hollywood was GLadstone 2387. At home we had the traditional “Elliot Ness” long necked phone with the ear piece hanging off of a cradle at a table in the dining room corner. That was THE phone for the house. I remember mother on it for an hour or two a day in the morning relaying orders for parts from outlying auto dealers in towns like Pasadena and Long Beach to supply houses downtown that were Dad’s customers. Mother would phone in these orders to Chanslor and Lyon for instance and say “Pickup by California” and then they would call CDS and ask for a pickup. Most of the time it was routine every day to make the rounds of these suppliers. Now all the phone switching is solid state circuitry and totally silent and hidden away in racks of panels.
UPS repeatedly tried to horn in and take away this business. They eventually succeeded with the stationary business that had been Dad’s main income source during the late ‘30’s and early ‘40’s. Morrie Morrison at LA Stamp and Stationery was close friends with Dad and Jack and gave them all his business for probably 15 years until he retired. Needless to say they treated him like family and he would invariably show up at gatherings year after year.
It was at the Main Street place where the huge dirigible Macon flew over LA and Dad rushed me out into the street to see it fly overhead. Spectacular! It was with that memory that we were so riveted and appalled when the Hindenburg went down in such a spectacular and tragic fashion in 1937. That is something I’ll never forget.
USS Macon at Sunnyvale 1933
Gosh do I get off track and go
on and on. The memories just won’t stop coming as I think back. These are
really vivid memories I’ve retained. It just takes a little nudge and out
they come.
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Paul is going to be sending me some photos of CDS and their trucks (yay!). So, until that time, I'm including some of the photos and articles from their Henderson Motorcycle days, since that's what started it all. In this first article, you'll notice Paul Sr. on the left testing the tires.
Paul Sr. in the news - March 7, 1928
[Unknown]
Paul Sr. and Paul Jr.
Here's a small portion of Paul Jr.'s interview of Jack B. Kemp. In this segment Jack tells a story about Tom being caught at the bowling alley when he was supposed to be delivering. And a story about Jack F. getting a truck stuck in a parking structure.
And here's Tom Kemp standing near one of the locations of California Delivery Service telling the story of "Ma Baum" (aka Mrs. Nussbaum) who owned the nearby deli. Paul, this one's for you...
And here are the two that started it all. Partners for over 30 years. Never an argument. Quite a legacy.
