Randy Westmoreland: No Two Days Are the Same

Q: How long have you been in the industry?

A: I just got my 45th year anniversary certificate from Swissport. I started in July 1959.

Q: What brought you to the industry 45 years ago?

A: My father (Ray Westmoreland), I went to work for him. I was 18; I started working for him right out of high school. He was one of the founding fathers of Servair, Dynair and Swissport ... the company was called Vertais.

Q: What did you do for him?

A: Everything. In 1959, my father was retired from the military and he and a fellow out of Boston, Roger Felman, started this company dealing with military contracts and remained so for 15 years at different locations. We started at McGuire AFB in New Jersey. We were also doing corrosion control, which meant stripping airplanes, taking all the paint off of them, checking for corrosion and cheap metal. In 1960 we renewed the McGuire contract and we acquired the Dover Delaware military contract doing the same thing. By 61 we had McGuire, Dover and Charleston. My father was running McGuire, I was running Dover and my brother (Tracy) was running Charleston; so for years it was a family operation. During those years, 1959--62, the military was big in charters. Charter and commercial airlines were hauling the dependents and the military guys around. It was at these three installations we started aircraft maintenance for the civilian airlines but we were operating with the military aircraft mechanics. Then in 1963 we had seven sponsors that requested us to come to Kennedy. These were big names; Eastern, TWA, Pan Am, etc. All of the carriers we ran on the military bases sponsored us at Kennedy, which was the first commercial airport we went into.

Q: Was it still under the same name in 1963?

A: When we went to Kennedy in '63 we changed the name to Servair but all the military contracts for those three years were Vertais. We actually had to go Teamsters Union and split the name into two names because they didn't want to unionize all the
rest of the stations.

Q: Was Servair doing the same thing as Vertais?

A: Yes, same company actually, but when we went into Kennedy it was cleaning and ramp operations. We were also big in those days in what we called configuration changes. I was jumping all over the east coast and some of the west coast doing conversions for the different carriers we ran. We were converting them from cargo to passenger and passenger back to cargo. We were doing five or six a month. This was everybody; Braniff, Airlift International, Pan Am, TWA, Eastern, Overseas International, Flying Tigers ? all of those carriers were handled. I think most of them are all gone but they were all big in cargo and military contracts in the '60s and '70s. Then we opened up Newark, New Jersey, Philadelphia and we had an operation in Baltimore. During the '70s I was on the road in charge of the start-up crews. I opened up Kennedy, Boston and Miami. Most of the major airports we're at today -- except a few of them -- I was involved in starting up.

Q: What was the employee growth over the years?

A: We probably employed 75--100 at each station with the military contracts, so probably 300 employees on the military contracts. Our Kennedy operations went from 1963 to 1972 and we sold the company to Dynlectron; that was the big expansion. I stayed on with them and we expanded at Kennedy. We went from 75 employees to about 250 overnight. It all started on New Year's night, 1973. We took about 80 percent of the contracts from our competition and invested 1.8 million dollars in equipment. We couldn't buy fuel because you could only buy a dollar a day for cars so we went through quite an expense for that too.

Q: Did they call it Dynlectron?