In 1908, a woman named Leota Bigelow wanted to talk to her mother, who lived a mile away in the Sierra foothills. So the two of them ordered telephones out of the Sears catalog, and their husbands strung a line between the houses using fence posts and trees.

That was the whole business plan.

Harmon Bigelow was running stagecoaches at the time, carrying the U.S. mail with two horses and a spring wagon. There is no version of that man’s imagination that included fiber-optic cable pulled through granite to reach 10,000 homes across 4,000 square miles. He was solving a problem for his wife.

FOBA honorees, winners lauded

We crowned our winners Wednesday evening and highlighted all eight honorees at our Family Owned Business Awards program at Pardini’s. After a month of putting that coverage together, that’s the thought I keep coming back to. None of these founders could have known.

 

Lawrence Barnes — everybody called him Pop — was driving a truck for a welding supply company in 1949 when he decided he’d rather do it himself. He had no money, so friends chipped in to finance it. He could not have known his company would one day sell the carbon dioxide behind half the draft beer in this Valley, or run 13 stores from Bakersfield to Citrus Heights.

Donald “Butch” Turner started a private investigation business in 1970. A friend of his, the chief of the Fresno Police Department, suggested he start a security company too. Butch could not have known his grandson would earn a drone certification because that’s where the family thinks the business is headed.

 

Tony and Betty Martinho opened a tile store in a milk barn in 1977. They had eleven children, and all eleven helped. Tony could not have known about the 40,000-square-foot showroom, or the apprenticeship program his grandchildren would build when the trades ran short of skilled labor.

Ron Stumpf got laid off and figured out you can’t fire yourself if you own the company. Mike Hamzy fled a war in Lebanon and started an engineering firm in 1984, the worst possible year to start one. Tom and Lisa Zimmerman launched a commercial interiors business in January 2009, and Michael Huxley started a construction company in 2005 with a work ethic and a job site.

None of them knew.

Changing business conditions

The landscape they built in doesn’t exist anymore. Not in California, anyway. The regulations, the cost of energy and insurance, the water, the labor shortage in the trades — the generation running these companies today is solving problems their founders never had to think about.

What they left instead was more durable —  a business worth keeping and a reason for the next generation to show up. Sam Bruce told us his grandparents taught him that business is about serving others. Mike Hamzy told us the most rewarding part of it all is having family working with you. That’s the inheritance. Everything else, the current generation has to earn again each day.

Several of these founders are gone. Tony Martinho died of cancer in 1993, at the moment a lot of family businesses quietly end. Butch Turner has passed. Harmon Bigelow has been gone a long time now. Robert Harbison, whose name is on the door at Harbison International, died in 1976 — eight years before his son-in-law put it over a new firm in Fresno.

 

Remembering founders

Their families remember them. But founders tend to be remembered inside the family and nowhere else, and that isn’t quite right. These people built things the rest of us use.

There’s a room at Ponderosa’s headquarters in O’Neals where the old switchboards are still set up. Frank Bigelow, fourth generation, stood next to them for our photographer with his hand on the equipment.

That picture is the whole thing. Somebody built that. Somebody else is still here because of it.

Congratulations to all eight honorees, and to the four who took home awards. And to the people who started it: you couldn’t have known. Thanks for going ahead anyway.