In Pursuit of Perfection
By his own admission, Carl Tapp, vice president of maintenance for P.A.M. Transportation Services Inc., is most comfortable working behind the scenes to move both the Tontitown, Ark.-based company and the trucking industry as a whole forward.
Throughout his long and varied career – first as a U.S. Army electronic maintenance specialist and noncommissioned officer, then as a trucking owner-operator, mechanic, shop foreman and finally as a vice president of maintenance with a national reputation as a technology leader, TMC task force chairman and Silver Spark Plug recipient – Tapp has stuck steadfastly to his core values in the face of seemingly insurmountable personal and professional challenges. In the process, he helped transform P.A.M. from a small regional carrier into a major national truckload fleet and an acknowledged leader in cutting-edge maintenance practices.
Learning leadership
Enter into even a brief conversation with Tapp, and his passion for education and knowledge quickly becomes apparent. That’s not surprising when you consider that both his parents were college professors specializing in foreign languages. In fact, Tapp’s father was fluent in about 15 different languages, and young Carl and his brother grew up speaking German as their first language.
Despite seemingly insurmountable challenges, Carl Tapp works steadfastly to give back to the industry that has served him so well over the last 30-plus years.
By the late 1950s, Tapp’s parents were teaching at Kent State University in Ohio. The school, the site of the Kent State massacre in 1970, was a hotbed for Vietnam War protests and left-wing politics, which Tapp found distasteful. Upon graduating from high school, he shocked his parents by announcing that he was enlisting in the U.S. Army. “It was a form of rebellion,” he says. “My parents sort of assumed I would go straight to college. My father felt that he’d sacrificed enough during World War II. He didn’t feel his sons were under any obligation to serve.”
While growing up, Tapp and his brother had tinkered with mini-bikes, go-carts and cars, including a 1958 Ford that Tapp bought for $10 and helping a friend race a 1959 Triumph TR3. While it was not surprising that Tapp did well on the languages portion of the Army aptitude tests, he also scored well in electronics and opted for cryptographic electronic repair training. A few months later, despite being fluent in German, he found himself posted in Hawaii serving Southeast Asia.
It was in the Army that Tapp first began to develop the professionalism and philosophies that would define his career. Placed in charge of a team of electronic maintenance specialists, Tapp would load his people into Air Force transports and fly all over Southeast Asia to troubleshoot sensitive electronic warfare systems in helicopters, aircraft, tanks, jeeps, trucks and even backpack radios. “It was a life-and-death situation with the COMSEC circuits we worked on,” Tapp says. “Someone was depending on the job you did. Do it wrong, and you could easily wipe out a whole platoon of soldiers.”
Here, for the first time, Tapp began to place an emphasis on not just his own attitude, but the attitude of the troops he was leading. “You have to maintain a good attitude, regardless of what is going on,” he stresses. “Your attitude makes a difference. And if you have the same drive every day, no matter what’s going on, that’s contagious in an organization.”
Moving into trucking
With Vietnam winding down, making the Army a career didn’t seem like an option for Tapp. So in 1977, he was honorably discharged and went into business for himself as an owner-operator. “I had a cabover Kenworth tractor,” Tapp recalls. “It was serial number 220091 – complete with a big doghouse in the cab and a 270-horsepower Caterpillar engine. And I ran all 48 contiguous states with it and Canada.”
