Our own ‘Steel Magnolia’

Published 4:51 pm Tuesday, December 6, 2005

MOULTRIE — Anyone who has ever seen the movie “Steel Magnolias” may have someone in mind who could have played a role in that production. And anyone who has been associated with Laura Ladson Sapp might very well draw a connection between her and the steely spirit of those depicted by Hollywood in that film.

Sapp is the driving force behind Sapp trucking on Sylvester Highway. She also is the matriarch of her immediate and extended family, having kept the business growing since the death of her husband Hilton two years ago.

The truck drivers who come into the office, refer to her as “Mrs. Laura” and treat her like the lady she is. She is known for helping family members and said she is thankful that she is in a position to do it.

She also has helped out her employees because she came from a tradition of neighbors helping neighbors and family supporting family. She said she believes that family comes first — that is the most important thing in life.

Sapp was born in Montgomery County in the wake of the Great Depression to George W. Ladson, a school teacher, and Gertrude Croft Ladson, a homemaker. The second oldest child in a family of six children, she helped her mother with the other siblings. When she was 12, two events happened that were significant each in their own way. First, the death of her father and second, the birth of the youngest of the Ladson children.

Her father’s death left the family in a tenuous situation because, during that time, it was very hard for a woman with six children and one on the way to make ends meet. After his death, they moved into the Berlin area to live on their grandparents farm which, in later years, she was able to buy back after it had been sold off.

Sapp said she has worked tirelessly to keep her family’s roots intact and knew that “the old home place”, going back to before the Civil War, needed to remain in the family forever. Sapp credits her family, immediate and extended, for helping them and supporting them through the tough times. She and her brothers and sisters worked together with other farming families to bring in tobacco and pick cotton. At that time, everyone out in the county farmed.

“We worked in the fields. We worked together. All families just worked and whatever was necessary to do we did,” she said, not that neighboring families shared their labor.

“We all worked. We were all poor but we didn’t know we were poor. We had as much as everybody else did. Nobody had much money but we lived well … we ate well living on a farm,” she said.

After World War II, things began looking up.

“Back when I was growing up very, very few women worked outside the home. They stayed home with their children and there were not too many two- income families,” she said.

Sapp described the closeness of communities with the church at its center. “We went to Wesley Chapel and Pleasant Hill Baptist Church as did our neighbors. The whole community was closer then they are now,” she said. Children looked to church for their social opportunities and lived a simpler more idealistic life.

“It was a great time to be a child. You worked hard and played hard,” she said. “It was family, friends and church.”

She married her life-long love Hilton Sapp and started a life of her own. She said, about her life with him, “If there is one thing I could give to my children, it would be the kind of marriage that we had. The togetherness we had. He was the love of my life.”

T.W. Sapp, the patriarch of the Sapp family and Laura’s father-in-law, bought a 10-wheeler truck and this was the humble beginning of a business that has turned into the highly successful corporation of today.

He had five sons and, one by one, each of them followed their father’s lead and bought their own truck. They all worked together, yet, each remained individuals in their own business. When they started working for Gold Kist in Moultrie, hauling peanuts, they combined into one entity called Sapp Brothers and split the revenues among themselves.

The company steadily grew as the peanut business grew into a year-round operation with Gold Kist. They also searched for other opportunities and started working with ADM of Valdosta. Then deregulation happened in the 1970s and turned their business upside down. Before deregulation, no other trucking companies could encroach upon their “territory”. They had it made because they had an “authority” issued by the Interstate Commerce Commission out of Atlanta. Afterward, it was an entirely new ball game. The industry and area was opened up to everyone and other trucking companies came in with cheaper prices.

The Sapp Brothers’ philosophy was: “If you can’t make money on a load, let the truck sit in the yard.” They realized, unlike many newer companies, that cutting prices would be detrimental in the long run. The other companies did not account for the eventual expenses such as, new tires, diesel fuel price fluctuations and maintenance that would come up in the future, Sapp said. They would just do the jobs at cut rate prices and eventually put themselves out of business.

“Over the years, I have seen so many trucking companies fall by the way side,” she said.

The company remained Sapp Brothers until all the brothers except two (Hilton and Herman) gradually got out of the business and went solely into farming. They expanded into Graceville, Fla. and opened an office there. In 1985, Herman was diagnosed with cancer so he sold his share of the company to Hilton and Laura and at that time the business was incorporated and the name changed to Sapp Trucking, Inc. It still remained, first and foremost, a family business. Unfortunately, also during that year, Hilton was forced to have open-heart surgery and was not in good health.

Laura found herself becoming more and more involved as Hiltons’s health deteriorated. She had always “taken care of the books” from when the brothers had first formed the company. She mostly did the payroll and paid the bills out of her office at home because when the business first started, the accounting was simpler.

Her full time job, however, was for the South Georgia Grocery Company in Quitman. She loved her job in Quitman and got a good background in accounting while on the job there. She worked for them for 10 years but as the company grew and Hilton’s health deteriorated, she quit her job and started working for the trucking company full time.

At one time the firm was running about 30 trucks but they decided to close up the Graceville office and get out of the peanut hauling business.

“You have to evolve with the times,” she noted.

The company moved to refrigerated trucks and initially started hauling for Premium Pork and when that company left town, it was replaced by National Beef, for whom they now haul freight. And now that Sanderson Farms has come along, they find themselves with another opportunity and another account.

“Trucking has been very good to us. I will tell anyone today, who wants to get into trucking, think long and hard. You better know what you’re doing. It’s not for amateurs,” she said.

When asked what the key to success is, Mrs. Sapp said, “Customer service. We do what our customers need … when they need it … 24 hours a day, seven days a week we’re there.”

With the passing of her husband, Hilton, Mrs. Sapp runs the business with her son, Tony and her grandson, Jay. Today there are three generations of Sapps working in the company and Mrs. Sapp is proud to have the newest edition to the Sapp legacy, her baby grandson, Hilton, stay with her at the office. “Little Hilton” spent the first year of his life in the office taken care of by his grandmother, his uncle Tony and his father, Jay. It was a great introduction to the family business that he may some day be a part of himself if family history is predominant in the issue.

Laura Sapp’s understanding of the trucking business is not just on paper. She can actually drive a big rig. Her husband took her out in a field where hogs had rooted holes and taught her to drive. At that time, the truck was their only form of transportation so it served a double purpose as their car and their livelihood.

Sapp has strong feelings about her community and the way things should be. She has been a member of the Moultrie-Colquitt County Chamber of Commerce since 1995 and thinks that it is a wonderful organization.

“I think good things are going to happen to Moultrie. I really do. Moultrie’s a great place to raise children,” she said, praising the Colquitt County Arts Center, the YMCA and school system.

Sapp has fond memories of coming to downtown on the weekends where there was a combination of visiting and shopping. And thus she promotes causes that will keep downtown viable.

Sapp is not fond of big chain stores because she sees them as detrimental to the family-owned businesses that comprise the very character of the square.

Having been a working mother, she promotes advances in daycare that will give women more options to work. She also sees a need for more affordable housing.

Sapp said she believes the biggest problem facing small businesses today is finding affordable health insurance for their employees. She says that is absolutely a nightmare.

“I’m a member of the Moultrie Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Small Businesses and the National Chamber of Commerce and I holler to them every time I get the chance. It is a national disgrace that something has not been done about health insurance,” she added.

Church continues to be a big part of her life ever since she joined the Methodist church when she was 12. She has been active in it ever since. She is a member of the First Methodist Church of Moultrie and she guesses that she has served on every committee possible, taught Sunday school for many years and has held just about every position a person could hold in the Methodist church. She is still very active in the United Methodist Women’s organization and occasionally teaches Sunday school.

“A Steel Magnolia is standing in the face of hardship and doing what you need to do,” Sapp said.

And she tells her nieces that whatever they go through in life to remember that they come from a long line of strong women.