Pittsburg Tank & Tower celebrating a lofty 100 years of unique history
HENDERSON, Ky. - It could scarcely have begun more modestly: One man, working out of his car, who in 1919 started traveling around the eastern edge of the Great Plains and looking up in search of tall things that needed fixing: smokestacks, church steeples, water towers and the like.
Now, 100 years later, Henderson-based Pittsburg Tank & Tower Group is celebrating its centennial, having grown from a one-man operation to a multi-million-dollar enterprise with hundreds of employees that have done work on six continents.
“The 100 years highlights to me the can-do attitude of the McClelland and Johnston families,” PTTG President Ben Johnston said. “When I think of the families the company has taken care of for the past 100 years, my heart smiles. I often think of two world wars, depressions, recessions and how we are still here today, and I sometimes think the issues we face in today’s world may be bigger than the past.”
Certainly PTTG itself has never been bigger. With three operating companies under its umbrella — Pittsburg Tank & Tower Co., Allstate Tower and Pittsburg Tank & Tower Maintenance Co. — the group saw revenues multiply by a factor of 15 from 1985 to 2015.
The company today is something founder Joseph B. McClelland could scarcely have imagined. He scratched out a modest living, at various times describing his profession as bridge man, ironworker, chimney builder or steeplejack — work done by a man who was not afraid of heights or climbing.
He would have pursued such work in western Missouri — he lived in or near Kansas City from the 1920s through the 1940s — and probably eastern Kansas and northern Arkansas, perhaps even a little farther afield. (Or not. He told a Census Bureau enumerator in 1940 that he worked a mere 11 weeks the previous year.)
At about that same time in Henderson, Johnston’s grandfather Jesse Lee Johnston — a man known as “Operator” who family and friends remember as possessing near-Herculean strength — started a welding company, taking jobs that often required climbing as well.
Operator’s middle son, Donald, at age 13 in 1945 climbed his first water tower to help his father dismantle and relocate it from Nashville, Tennessee, to Edmonton, Kentucky.
By then, the McClelland and Johnston families were pursuing eerily similar paths. Out west on the prairie, Cloyce N. McClelland — who adopted the name John — took over his father’s company and relocated it to Pittsburg, Kansas. In the early 1950s, he incorporated it as Pittsburg Tank & Tower Co.
It concentrated on water tower maintenance — repainting and performing minor steel repairs on elevated tanks that provide storage capacity and boost pressure for municipal water systems. It also did work for factories that kept water towers on their premises in case a fire broke out.
By the mid-1950s, Don Johnston had come home from the Army and done a stint with the mighty Chicago Bridge & Iron Co., where he secured an education in water tank construction. In 1957, he formed a company — Globe Industrial Contractors — to paint, repair and dismantle water tanks.
It was just another of those inexplicable coincidences along the parallel paths of the Johnston and McClelland families. Don Johnston had just established a water tank company called Globe — and John McClelland had adopted a logo that featured a globe of Earth from which an eagle’s head and wings had sprouted. (The company retains a version of that logo to this day.)
Over time, the two companies’ owners became acquainted, and Globe began providing subcontracting work for Pittsburg Tank. In 1983, Don Johnston purchased Pittsburg Tank and relocated it to Henderson.
In those days, the men who traveled the country working on water tanks — climbing, welding, sandblasting, painting and so on — were largely untamed and fearless. Don’s son Ben was among them — he says he loved the freedom of working high in the sky, particularly when it involved building a water tower, taking a pile of steel and, over hours and days, creating a structure that towered 100 feet or more over a small town or rural landscape.
But the work was also exceedingly dangerous. Tower men relied on nerve and their own sure footing; a single misstep could send a worker plunging to a gruesome death.
As a young man, Ben Johnston was called to account how his family’s company had prepared a newly hired man — who lived in Texas and whom he had never even met — to work safely. Johnston said he didn’t feel comfortable with the answers he had to give.
He resolved then, in the early 1980s, to reshape the company, despite his father’s initial skepticism. Like his peers and employees, Don Johnston believed that safety was each man’s own personal responsibility, not the company’s.
Ben Johnston and people employed by the company in that era recall hard-working men who had long been unencumbered by rules — such as wearing highly engineered safety harnesses precisely anchored overhead — sought to rebel against the new requirements. Some workers were so resistant that Johnston and the new safety director had to go on the road to spy on crews with binoculars to confirm that they were following rules.
It took years, but the new safety program — which insiders say evolved into a safety culture — took hold. By 2011, Pittsburg Tank & Tower’s Henderson operations had become one of only 15 worksites in the state to earn Kentucky’s Safety and Health Achievement Recognition Program (SHARP) certification. The rate of accidents — and fatalities — plummeted. So did the company’s insurance premiums. Ben Johnston and other company insiders say Pittsburg Tank & Tower wouldn’t have survived otherwise.
Much more happened besides. In 2000, the company began construction on a new $7 million fabrication plant and headquarters in Henderson Corporate Park. The 106,000-square-foot manufacturing plant, employing modern and safer manufacturing systems, replaced an old operation on Fifth Street, enabling the company to more efficiently shape steel for new tanks.
In 2003, the Johnston family entered the communication tower business — building and maintaining cell phone towers and related structures — with its Allstate Tower business.
The family companies managed to not only survive, but even come out the better from calamities. In May 2007, an Allstate Tower subcontractor made the mistake of using a welding torch while working on a radio station tower on Catalina Island off the coast of Southern California. During the midst of a drought, it triggered a fire that ultimately set thousands of acres of tinder-dry brush ablaze and threatening to incinerate the tourist town of Avalon, forcing the evacuation by ferry of thousands of people.
It was a catastrophe that threatened to wreck Allstate and its sister company Pittsburg Tank. But the companies survived years of litigation — and insurance covered the damages. Ben Johnston saw to it that they emerged smarter, with a greater focus on training, quality and determining which jobs the companies wanted, and which they didn’t.
“It had as much to do with making us the company we are today as safety,” Ben Johnston said of an enterprise that is ranked among the nation’s largest steel erectors and specialty contractors.
A milestone event took place in 2010 when the Johnston family acquired a 275,000-square-foot complex for Allstate on Heilman Avenue in Henderson. It has evolved into a manufacturing center capable of fabricating steel with such precision that structures towering hundreds of feet can be shipped around the country, and world, and can confidently be assembled by outside crews (although Allstate does erection work as well).
More recently, Allstate Tower has found a niche in agriculture — fabricating steel support systems for conveyors and other structures at grain elevators, processing plants and related facilities.
So it is that Pittsburg Tank & Tower Group — incorporated in 2012 to unite the Johnston family’s water tank and communication tower businesses — has grown to rely on three commodities with seemingly unceasing demand by people: water, wireless signals and food.
In 2017, Ben Johnston and staff oversaw a celebration of Don Johnston’s 85th birthday. The company patriarch continued reporting to work until mere days before dying at his home on Jan. 2, 2018.
Since then, Ben Johnston has been focused on observing Pittsburg Tank & Tower’s 100th anniversary. Monthly celebrations are planned this year that will involve employees, their families and, in some cases, the community.
(The company has also commissioned a book — which, full disclosure, I have been hired to research and write — to chronicle its 100-year history.)
The centennial celebration will peak Aug. 17 with an event that PTTG is planning, in conjunction with the Henderson County Diabetes Coalition, in Audubon Mill Park that will include food, fun, festivities and fireworks.
“100 years,” the theme declares, “and still climbing.”
It’s a milestone that towers above what a man out on the prairie in 1919 could have conceived.