A barrel of history
Watson Truck and Supply in Hobbs unearths 25-year-old time capsule
Andy Brosig/News-Sun
A bushel of old newspapers. Logo caps vacuum-sealed in plastic. Dozens of photographs. Vintage Beanie Babies. A broken socket from a well-used wrench set.
These are just a few of the items unearthed last week when a crew of long-time employees at Watson Truck and Supply in Hobbs went on a mini-archeological expedition in the parking lot outside the business on North Grimes Street. Their prize wasn’t gold or jewels or artifacts of some ancient civilization.
Instead, what they found might have been even more valuable — to them, at least. Using a fork truck, they extracted a well-preserved steel cask, built in their own fabrication shop. Inside were memories of a very different Watson Truck and Supply Company from more than a quarter century ago.
To set the stage: It was the year 2000. The world had survived the “Millenium Bug” scare, when doom-sayers expected planet Earth to shut down when computers were unable to cope with the date change from 1999 to the 21st century. A group of Watson employees — no one really remembers who — started circulating the idea of putting together a time capsule.
“Because it was the year 2000, I think they just felt like that would be a good time to do it,” said Mike Ham, who works in the oilfield supply division at Watson. “Then they just started going around and asking for everybody to kind of give something to put in, from what I remember.”
That’s right — Ham was working at Watson when the time capsule was assembled and buried 25 years ago. He started with Watson in 1985 and was “chasing parts” for customers 25 year ago when the time capsule was buried.
And he wasn’t alone. Everyone who attended the excavation on Tuesday worked for the company at the time.
Anticipation was definitely in the air as the fork truck raised the steel cask from its resting place, backed up a couple of feet and gently lowered it to the waiting concrete. Then, an employee with a heavy hammer and a steel punch went around the less-than 3-foot tall metal cylinder, loosening bolts and knocking them out of their holes so the thick steel lid, sealed with silicone caulk, could be removed to reveal what waited inside.
Once the capsule was open, Finn Smith, Watson’s president, went down on one knee. Pulling out yards of bubble wrap that cushioned the contents on their journey through time, Smith began extracting the pieces of the company’s history.
As well as he could remember, Smith had been new to the job of leading the company around the time the capsule was buried.
“I’m excited to open it back up and see what all’s in there,” Smith said before the ceremony. “I don’t even remember what I put in there.
“I wish I did, but maybe once we open it up and I see what’s in there, maybe something will come back to me. Anybody that wanted to — to the best of my recollection — we just dropped it in there and said we’d wait and open it back up about this time.”
Rita Mings, who’s worked in the accounts department at Watson since before the capsule went in the ground, confirmed the plan was always to open it this year. She’s the last remaining employee in the main office who was working there in 2000.
“It’s pretty cool” opening the time capsule after all those years, Mings said. “That’s a lot of memories.”
A very different business was revealed as the items came out of the capsule, one by one. For example, the lot on North Grimes Street filled today with custom-built trucks for the oil industry was a Buick, Chevrolet and Pontiac car dealership back then, Smith said.
“We probably were larger at that time in terms of revenue we were doing because we were still a car dealership then,” he said. “Today, we’ve just got our truck dealership and our oil field supply business. … And our manufacturing business.”
Economic changes across the nation drove the company to phase out its auto dealership around 2013, Smith said, to get away from retail vehicle sales and move more into commercial accounts. The business away from one-time car sales to individuals more toward supply fleets of specialized trucks and equipment to company’s working in the growing oil field.
“Back then, and even still today, the automotive business was heavily saturated with dealers and the margins dealers were able to get selling new cars were challenging,” Smith said. “I much prefer a relationship-style of business.
“I would say our marketplace looks much different today. If I think back to 2000 and the type of businesses we had here locally … in my view you had a lot more mom-and-pop businesses than we do today. It seems, as the oil field — especially in our area — has transitioned to much larger up-front investments, it has brought in much larger players.”
Also, Smith said, the year 2000 saw the real beginning of the internet age, particularly for business. Where salespeople would once connect with customers one-to-one, the business began moving more toward online experiences, where customers view Watson’s product line on their computers and decide what they need.
“The market has gone from what I think was more of a face-to-face transaction versus putting your pricing, the products you have available (online), making them accessible to people to look up on their phone, quickly access and … place an order or do whatever they need and go on about their way,” he said. “I’m sure there’s benefits to that. I think it can make business easier to transact.”
It’s also forced businesses, not just Watson, to think more about the information they’re providing to customers and potential customers to simply that online process, he said. Customers in almost any industry today are accustomed to texting or sending an email, outlining their needs, rather than going to a showroom to talk to a salesperson.
There are both advantages and disadvantages to the online models so prevalent today, Smith said. It’s definitely made things easier but it’s cost some of the personal touch. And that’s something he misses.
“I definitely think it has taken away from some of the face-to-face interaction you have,” Smith said. “But at the same time, it’s probably opened up more for us to have relationships with people we may not have had otherwise, just by their having access to information.”
Ham agreed.
“With a lot of the technology, especially with the email, it’s taken some of the face-to-face out of it,” he said. “And, you know, we miss that because we built a lot of rapport with all of our customers we can. That’s the way it’s always been.”
And Ham feels the loss of that personal touch. It used to be he could run into customers out in the community and have relationships outside the business setting. Today, he said, orders can come in from almost anywhere via email and the people servicing those customers might never see them.
“You might never know that person,” Ham said “Before, you might be sitting next to them in a restaurant or something where you could strike up a conversation if you knew them doing face-to-face business all the time.”
Still, there was a strong sense of the nostalgia of opening a time capsule that’s been in the ground for a quarter century, Ham said. He gravitated to an old hat, flattened out by time near the bottom of the capsule and the weight of other items on top of it, definitely not wearable. It is a keepsake that belonged to a now-retired outside salesman for the company, Maurice “Shorty” Maddux.
“And there’s probably some pictures from (the department he worked in 25 years ago),” Ham said. “There’s some sentimental value to all of it and just seeing some of those old pictures, that’s pretty cool.
“It’s kind of fascinating, really. This is one big family around this outfit. So that kind of makes you feel good.”
