Lew Flowers is manager of vehicle maintenance at the U.S. Postal Service in Oklahoma City, and he’s responsible for more than 2,100 vehicles, 51 employees in three locations, and
a $5 million budget. But that’s only part of why he’s the recipient of CCJ’s 2007 Career Leadership Award.
If Lew Flowers ever gets flustered, you’d probably never know it. He appears to be the laid-back, affable sort, with a great sense of humor.
But when it comes to vehicle maintenance and technician training, he’s as serious – and effective – as they come.
Flowers is manager of vehicle maintenance at the Oklahoma District U.S. Postal Service in Oklahoma City, and he’s responsible for more than 2,100 vehicles, 51 employees in three locations, and a $5 million budget. But that’s only part of why he’s this year’s Career Leadership Award recipient.
Getting started
As a young man growing up in the Tidewater area of Virginia, Flowers had enormous respect for his father – who was a maintenance manager for the Department of Transportation – and for his dad’s love of restoring boats. Eventually, Flowers got his own small boat and came to enjoy fishing, crabbing and all the other pleasures afforded by life on the Chesapeake Bay.
In high school, he played “a little football,” and played tenor sax in a local band, “The Swinging Hangmen.” But it was his interest in engines that led him to become a diesel mechanic trainee throughout high school and college. He has since earned multiple Automotive Service Excellence certifications in automotive and heavy truck repairs.
After maintenance management and training stints at UPS and the U.S. Department of Justice, Flowers became a training developer at the USPS in Oklahoma, and became maintenance manager there in 1989.
