For more than 40 years, Southwest Freight has been providing outstanding transportation service and innovative problem-solving to a wide variety of businesses in Dallas-Fort Worth and the Southwest.

Those seeds of excellence were planted in 1966 when Ira Jones, then a vice president for Brown Express, left that firm to found Texas Parcel Service in the suburbs of Dallas.

In the early years, Texas Parcel Service functioned mainly as a pool distributor for major national manufacturers. With the addition of several retail accounts in the 1970's, Mr. Jones formed Southwest Freight Distributors to handle that segment of the business. With retirement beckoning, he sold his two entities separately in 1979 with Southwest Freight being purchased by Terry Kelley, a well-known Dallas banker.

For three years, Mr. Kelley ran the business himself. With a base of just a few retail accounts, he quickly recognized the need to expand and diversify. He moved the firm into public warehousing and also began to focus on the new rail intermodal phenomenon that had begun to take hold in the early 1980's, most specifically the inland movement of ocean containers. Southwest Freight quickly established relationships with the major steamship lines and began providing both container unloading and drayage services.

In 1983, Mr. Kelley decided to return to banking. Retaining ownership, he left the day-to-day operations to Rich Eberhart and Bob Luchsinger. In 1987, U.S. Customs named Southwest Freight as a Centralized Exam Station (CES), a designation the company holds to this day. In 1988 Mr. Kelley sold out to Mr. Eberhart and Mr. Luchsinger.

In the 1990's, the company concentrated on growing its trucking operations along with its container handling and pool distribution services. At the dawn of the new millennium Southwest Freight was operating from three warehouses in the DFW area and employed more than 200 people.

Today, Southwest Freight's 140 driver fleet does everything from local and regional LTL, to local and regional intermodal drayage, to dedicated driver/tractor contract work for a number of national accounts. Its warehouses process freight ranging from retail merchandise and imported furniture to machinery, computers, and cotton.

Through 40 years of ups and downs, successes and hiccups, changes in attitude, culture and technology, Southwest Freight has endured and excelled. From Ira Jones and on, the focus has always been on the employee and the customer. Sometimes the most common-sense philosophies prove to be the best.