Portable Sanitation Association International

12 I PSAI Association Insight, December 1, 2021 Past Presidents Reflect Upon the PSAI's Past: Ned Carpenter and Flay Anthony (continued from page 11) manufactured packaged and block ice, distributed petroleum fuels and propane, and also had a company that built packaged ice plants, sold the manufacturing supplies for the ice plants along with the boxes where the ice packages were placed in a convenience store. At the age of 32, Ned was the Corporate Controller for all the companies and General Manager of the petroleum companies. Ned was active in the North Carolina Oil Jobbers Association, where he served on several committees and was one year from becoming the President when he left the Lowie Companies to work full-time at Porta-Jon on Jan. 1, 1980. The reason for this change in employment is that Ned heard his dad tell a friend he did not want his company to get any bigger. This led Ned to talk with his dad about coming to work with him. Porta-Jon was a 300-unit company and Ned felt he could grow the company. Ned started attending the PSA meetings with the Nuts and Bolts Educational Conference in Jacksonville, Florida, where he also made his first presentation on accounting in the portable sanitation business. After a presentation at a Nuts and Bolts event in Tucson, Arizona, Ned welcomed the attendees to attend the PSA Board Meeting. At the end of the presentation, President Carroll Laborde told Ned that he had just invited everyone to a board meeting that was closed as the agenda was to discuss salaries with the Executive Director! "It was a rookie mistake, I suppose, but I was eager to share the PSAI with everyone," states Ned. PolyJohn units from George Harding." Ned could not convince his dad to go to another convention until the early '80s when Ned was working full time with Porta-Jon. Reese went from wooden units to fiberglass units in the mid-1970s when Duke Power Company ordered 12 Porta-Jons for the construction of their first nuclear power plant. He had to buy fiberglass units because he could not build the wooden units fast enough and still do his deliveries and servicing. "He drove three hours to Virginia Fiberglass in Roanoke, Virginia to pick up his first load. Before he picked up a second load, he built a trailer to haul three Porta-Jons plus three on his truck and then he could haul six total units. Growth comes in small increments," Ned laughs. In 1973, Ned started working with the Lowie Companies, with 18 companies in North and South Carolina that After graduating from Belmont Abbey College in May 1972, Ned worked for a CPA firm—but always stayed involved in the business. Ned remembers these early days: "Dad used 4'X 8' pieces of DuraPly, which was plywood with a slick side for the outside of the unit and the plywood rough on the inside. When painted with a gray fiberglass resin, the outside of the unit was as impervious to water as Dad could make it. Like other people of the time building their own units, the urinals were welded metal with the tank being one-half or three-quarters of a 50-gallon metal drum. When servicing, Dad used a portable vacuum system that operated off the truck motor to pump out units. For deliveries, the vacuum system was removed from the pickup truck bed with a come along. Dad first used a coal tar for deodorizing liquid but later used a deodorizing liquid with a formaldehyde base that he mixed himself." Ned's first involvement with the Portable Sanitation Association (as it was then known) was in November 1973, when he accompanied his dad to the PSA Convention in Bar Harbour, Florida, near Miami. Reese had never been to any kind of convention or trade show, so Ned went with him to start the learning process. When any of us go to a trade show and convention, it is always hard to know what will happen because you think everyone else knows what is going on and that is just not true. Ned feels that this is where Reese was introduced to George Harding and "Dad started buying the round plastic units from him in the early 1980s and later buying the (continued on page 13)

• Cover