From Humble Beginnings to Global Giant: The History of UPS
On August 28, 1907, a story of American ingenuity began in a modest six-foot by seven-foot basement office beneath a Seattle saloon. It was there that nineteen-year-old James Emmett “Jim” Casey and his friend Claude Ryan, with a borrowed $100, founded the American Messenger Company. This humble venture, employing six boys to deliver telegraphs, messages, and run errands, would eventually blossom into United Parcel Service (UPS), the world’s largest and most valuable transportation company. In 2017, UPS delivered over 5 billion packages to 220 countries, a testament to its remarkable growth.
Early Life and Influences of Jim Casey
Jim Casey’s roots trace back to Ireland. His father, Henry Casey, emigrated from County Galway, while his mother, Annie Sheehan, was the daughter of immigrants from County Cork. They met and married in Chicago before moving to the mining district of Candelaria, Nevada, where they operated a saloon. Henry's pursuit of silver mining was cut short by miner’s lung disease, prompting the family to relocate to Seattle in 1897 when Jim was nine years old.
Seattle was a booming city, its growth fueled by the Klondike Gold Rush. However, Henry Casey's attempt to strike it rich in the Yukon ended in a shipwreck. Consequently, Jim left school at the age of eleven to support his family. He found work as a delivery driver's assistant for the Bon Marche department store, earning $2.50 a week. This experience gave him an intimate knowledge of Seattle's streets and numbering system.
By mid-1901, Jim was earning $5 a week at a tea store. He then took a lower-paying night job at American District Telegraph (ADT) to return to school. During his ADT shift, Jim delivered messages and ran errands, befriending Claude Ryan. Their work involved diverse tasks, from notifying railroad engineers of emergency runs to babysitting, pumping a church organ, collecting bail, and even delivering illicit substances.
After further schooling, Jim’s financial responsibilities led him to drop out and dedicate his time to ADT. Nevertheless, Jim Casey never stopped learning, reading, and listening to others. By 1903, he had saved $30 and, with two friends, started the City Messenger Service, delivering telephone messages. This venture led him to Goldfield, Nevada, where he started another messenger service with two partners, delivering messages from the local telephone and telegraph office. The boys wore pillbox hats and double-breasted jackets with brass buttons. This business was a success, but then partner John Moritz was shot and killed by a vagrant.
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The American Messenger Company: A Foundation is Laid
Following these adventures, nineteen-year-old Jim reunited with his ADT friend Claude Ryan to start yet another messenger service, this time called the American Messenger Company, on August 28, 1907. Borrowing $100 in startup funds, they acquired two telephones, two bicycles for long-distance deliveries, and hired six boys. They offered “the best service and the lowest rates” compared to their nine competitors. Moreover, they told customers the truth about when they would pick up their message or package, an unusual practice in the competitive business. Jim and Claude knew the flow of goods and information in Seattle; they knew every nook and cranny of the city. They posted placards all around Seattle with their phone number and their service and price offering. They charged 15 to 65 cents per message, depending on distance, or 25 cents per hour for errands.
As in his prior experience, Jim and his friends had to run many odd errands. One posed for an art class; another took a blind man to a funeral. They minded stores when the owner went to lunch and walked dogs for other customers. This made the business complex and hard to plan. Jim hungered for a way to streamline the business, and found it when the nearby King Brothers Clothing store hired American Messenger to deliver merchandise to customers. American Messenger moved to bigger offices and opened a second location in Seattle when younger brother George Casey joined the business in 1911.
Merchants Parcel Delivery: Focusing on Retail
Jim’s ambition extended beyond simply delivering messages. He envisioned capturing the delivery business of Seattle's major retailers, believing they could save money by outsourcing their delivery fleets. He began “partnering up” with other messenger services rather than using scarce cash to buy them out, which became a modus operandi for the realization of Jim’s bigger dreams. In 1913, American Messenger merged with Evert “Mac” McCabe’s Motorcycle Delivery Company. Mac was an extroverted salesman and had as much energy as Jim and Claude. Mac’s wife, Garnet McCabe, helped with the office, but she had a reputation of being hard to get along with. The combined company, now called Merchants Parcel Delivery, had twenty-five messengers and six motorcycles, and soon added a Ford Model T with a bright red van body on the chassis. By 1915, the company was the largest delivery service in Seattle, with four cars, five motorcycles, and thirty messengers on foot.
The company needed more cash if it were to continue growing, however. After being turned down by bankers, in 1916 Jim convinced Charlie Soderstrom to buy $10,000 worth of Merchants Parcel stock. Charlie was a veteran delivery driver who headed the delivery operations of one of Seattle’s four department stores, Fraser-Paterson. He understood the delivery business and was impressed by Jim and Claude’s skills, integrity, and drive. Merchants Parcel considered painting their cars and vans bright yellow to attract attention, or even painting them different colors to make people think the company was larger than it was. But Charlie warned that they should not try to show up their retail customers, who were proud of their brightly decorated delivery vehicles. He had studied the more subtle Pullman brown, the color used on railroad sleeping cars to minimize signs of dust and dirt.
The Birth of United Parcel Service
In 1917, reportedly due to conflicts with Garnet McCabe, Claude Ryan left the company. Jim’s brother George Casey joined the navy in World War I, but returned to the company two years later. Under Jim’s leadership, the group never stopped improving, never stopped learning, and wanted to grow. Jim developed a bin-based parcel sorting system. During this period, Merchants Parcel got its first big customer, Seattle’s Bon Marche department store, named after the famous Paris store. Jim and his colleagues made three pickups every day at the big store. The leading stores were reluctant to give up their own delivery operations, where they could advertise on the vehicles and insure good service. At first, “The Bon” kept its own fleet and used Merchants, but was soon satisfied with the new service and abandoned its own delivery fleet. Gradually, Merchants Parcel won over three of the four biggest stores in Seattle. In the coming years, delivering for big retail clients became the key business of the company. “B2C” (business-to-consumer) deliveries became their specialty.
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In this same era, in pursuit of efficiency, Merchants started using the same driver every day on the same assigned route, so that customers could get to know their driver. And the company began a policy of making three delivery attempts before returning the goods to the shipper. As World War I came to an end, the partners wanted to expand to other cities and needed cash. In nearby San Francisco, there was already a Merchants Parcel company, so they could not use that name in the Bay Area. George liked the word “United” as in United Fruit. Mac suggested United Parcel, as Jim was insistent that Parcel be part of the name. And Charlie said their core was Service. Thus the name “United Parcel Service” was born (years later shortened to just “UPS”). With Jim as president, United Parcel Service opened in Oakland in February 1919.
In the following years, United Parcel Service continued to buy other delivery companies, usually by using shares of stock, thus conserving cash. In the early 1920s, Jim and his partners moved their headquarters to Los Angeles, which became an important center for them. While continuing to focus on local delivery for retailers, one of the companies they acquired there had “common carrier” rights-the legal ability to carry any package of any size to any address over a broader area of Southern California. In 1925, four of the big department stores in San Francisco asked Mac McCabe to take over their delivery operations, which UPS did. In March of 1928, Charlie Soderstrom was golfing at the Fox Hills Country Club in Southern California when he was hit in the head by a stray ball.
Innovation and Expansion in the Early Years
The 1920s saw UPS’s introduction of automatic car washes for its vehicles, conveyor belts for sorting, and the now-famous brown uniforms. From the start, Jim was obsessed with the appearance of his drivers. The company had (and has) strict rules on appearance. Other key ideas developed in these early years included the UPS Policy Book, issued to each employee and listing over one hundred highly detailed policies. The company banned employees’ relatives from being hired by the company, halting any potential issues of nepotism. UPS became highly decentralized, with power delegated into regions, districts, and hubs. Jim required a policy of informality, with everyone called by their first names. Executives did not have private secretaries, and answered their own phones.
UPS focused intensely on efficiency-the best driving routes, not making left turns if one could avoid them, never backing up, holding the car keys in the right hand for quick starts, and timing and measuring every aspect of the enterprise. Internal communications became important to the growing company; in 1924, UPS started its first employee newspaper, The Big Idea. Reflecting Jim’s own nature, integrity and honesty were prized above all else. Such tight rules have been likened to the military; UPS is one of the most disciplined organizations in the world. This type of environment is not right for everyone, but those who love it have found it empowering (because it works) and enriching (in more ways than one).
Jim adopted a policy of promotion from within, and today many of the top people at UPS started as drivers or package sorters, and have been with the company over twenty-five years. An important development in this time was Jim Casey’s uncommon acceptance of trade unions. While he worked hard to treat all his employees right, he saw the rise of the unions and thought he could work with them. Gradually, city by city, UPS’s drivers became members of the powerful Teamsters’ Union. Most business leaders of the era hated the unions and did everything they could to keep them out. Ten years later General Motors and particularly Ford fought unionization of their factories hard-and lost. Jim felt differently.
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Perhaps the most important change at UPS was Jim’s decision to “share the wealth.” In 1927, consistent with his regard for his associates, the company offered stock in UPS at $15 a share to fifty-two key employees, all of whom but three took advantage of the offer. The recipients were allowed five years to pay for the stock. And they could sell the stock back to the company at a price set four times a year by the board of directors, prices which would consistently rise over the years. For seventy-two years, all UPS stock was owned by the founders, their families and heirs, and other employees. It became the largest employee-owned company in America. Today’s UPS each year spends billions on health insurance and pensions for both union and non-union employees. The company was among the first to offer such benefits to its employees, usually bearing the entire cost. All of this grew out of Jim’s thinking about the people he worked with.
Air Delivery and a Near Takeover
At Mac McCabe’s urging, UPS took a plunge into air delivery, creating the nation’s first air parcel service, United Air Express, in February 1929. At the same time, Jim and his friends lusted after the big New York City market, but they did not have the capital to enter it. With the stock market booming and many mergers taking place, the newly formed aviation giant Curtiss-Wright (descended from the pioneering companies of Glenn Curtiss and the Wright Brothers) offered to buy UPS, including its new air service. In the fall of 1929, Curtiss-Wright paid $2 million in cash and 600,000 shares of Curtiss-Wright to buy UPS. UPS stockholders became Curtiss-Wright stockholders. UPS used the $2 million to enter New York and moved its headquarters there in 1930 (headquarters moved again, to Connecticut in 1975, and to Atlanta in 1991).
But the new arrangement didn’t last five years: the stock market crashed in October 1929 and the demand for a fast, expensive air parcel service dried up. Jim and his partners bought their company back and exchanged the Curtiss-Wright stock for UPS shares. It took four years of hard work to unwind the deal. Best of all, they did not have to return the $2 million cash, which they used to conquer the big New York delivery market. In 1931, Mac McCabe’s son, Gene, died at the age of twenty-two. Mac’s wife, Garnet, was inconsolable, and bothered by Mac’s continuing obsession with work. on February 12, 1933, Garnet shot and killed her husband in their posh New York apartment.
Continued Growth and Expansion of Service
The company just kept growing and growing. In 1930, UPS had 400 employees. Four years later, this number was 1,400. Having developed city-wide retail delivery services in many cities, UPS wanted to deliver into more remote areas and across state borders. Jim Casey and partners also wanted to carry larger loads on longer hauls, including business-to-business traffic. In 1952, Jim and his colleagues applied to the California Public Utilities Commission for the right to carry merchandise between Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, which they got in 1953. From 1952 to 1986, in front of regulatory commissions and in the courts, UPS spent an enormous amount of time, money, and energy battling for territorial transportation rights. Despite the desire of thousands of shipping customers to have UPS service, their foes were power…
In 1953, UPS began common carrier operations, serving commercial and residential shippers in some cities including Chicago - the first city outside of California in which UPS offered this. The company also reintroduced air service (there was a badly-timed two-year venture started in 1929) offering two-day delivery to major East and West Coast cities.
UPS Today
In 1985, UPS Next Day Air service became the first air delivery network to reach every address in the 48-contiguous states, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico. After a decade of seeing its reach grow throughout the Americas and Europe, in 1989 UPS extended service to the Middle East, Africa, and the Pacific Rim. In 1994, UPS moved its corporate headquarters to Atlanta with construction emphasizing energy efficiencies and an extensive tree protection and replacement program. The location at 55 Glenlake Parkway is still its current home. During the 1990s, UPS expanded its vision to become a true enabler of global commerce. This led, to the big step of going public for the first time on Nov. After expanding its portfolio throughout the decade, UPS began offering Saturday ground delivery and Saturday pickup services.
The UPS Archives
The collection of the UPS Archives documents a service-driven logistics and transportation company that has evolved to meet the needs of its customers across the global marketplace. UPS was founded in 1907 as a telephone messenger service originally named American Messenger Company. The early deliveries were made - mostly on foot or by streetcar and, occasionally delivered via bicycle on the hilly streets of Seattle. By 1913 the company’s business focus shifted to delivering purchases made at retail stores. The stores knew that people would buy more if they didn’t have to carry their purchase home themselves. In 1919 the company expanded to Oakland, CA, and changed the name to United Parcel Service. UPS continued to deliver retail packages as its primary business until the early 1950s, when the business focus shifted to delivering common carrier and wholesale packages - in other words business to business, business to consumer, or personal shipments.
For the company’s 50th anniversary, work began on a book about the history of the company. Though that book was never published, these documents and interviews compiled about the founding of the company and its leadership formed the beginnings of the UPS Archives. These materials were housed in various offices and departments until 1987, when the items were organized into a single company archives location. When UPS moved into the current corporate office in Atlanta, GA in 1994, the Archives finally gained a dedicated, environmentally controlled, and most importantly, secure physical space.
The UPS Archives holds approximately 5,000 cubic feet of materials. The vast majority of the collection is paper items - mostly training materials, employee publications, customer publications, annual reports, letters to the shareholders, and incorporation documents. The collection also contains a vast number of photographic materials covering all areas of UPS operations and employee life dating back to 1910.
The UPS archival collection is used in many ways. It is a source of research material and content assets for speeches, presentations, and internal and external communications. The UPS Archives also houses the UPS History Exhibit. The exhibit gives a visual representation of UPS history and culture. The exhibit contains a brief timeline and individual exhibit areas that cover the topics of technology, company founders and leaders, community service, environmental efforts, vehicles (both ground and air), driver experience, employee culture, and sponsorships. New UPS employees, interns, newly transferred employees, media, student groups, and customers are the typical visitors to the exhibit.
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