PUBLISHER'S VIEWPOINT
June 2005
Fond Remembrances

I lost two really good friends in April. Bruce Hicks, a long-time rep, and Dick Jones, president of Rankin-Delux, both succumbed to cancer. I don’t want to minimize either of their individual contributions, but it makes some sense to write about both of them here, because, in some ways, their lives were similar.

I met Bruce for the first time at a MAFSI annual meeting in Las Vegas in 1983. I was having dinner with Bruce and Gordon Oates Sr., when Bruce asked us if we’d like to see something very interesting. The three of us climbed into Bruce’s car and headed downtown to an old steakhouse, the kind of place where Bugsy Siegel must have hung out in the 1950s. We traipsed in, Bruce shook hands with the owner, and we all proceeded to march back to the kitchen. There was an old Wolf heavy-duty range, at least 20 years old, but still square as could be. It had a power burner, a blower to boost combustion of one of the burners. Wolf had the technology back in the ’60s, and Bruce had sold that range

In some ways, the lives of Bruce Hicks and Dick Jones were similar.

Vulcan, which owned Wolf even then, ended up reviving and marketing the technology. Me, I just figured Bruce knew everything. And he did. During his career he was a rep, a dealer, a rep again, a distributor (his Same Day Distributing continues on run by his wife Susan), a manufacturer. He served on the MAFSI board and received its Pacesetter Award. He received a President’s Award from FCSI. He volunteered hours and hours to food safety advisory committees in Los Angeles and Orange County and received the Mark C. Nottingham Award from the California Environmental Health Association. He was a Level I Certified Foodservice Professional.

For us, he was a friend who always taught us something. I’ll miss him greatly.

Like Bruce, Dick Jones did just about everything in this business. He inherited a bar from his father in Flint, Mich., but soon became a dealer of equipment and supplies. He helped the founders of the Delfield Co. take the Detroit-based company national. Now, of course, it’s part of Enodis.               

He moved to St. Louis in ’63 and founded a rep firm, R.R. Jones Associates. In ’66, he met Bill Rankin of Delux Equipment, who at that time was making backyard grills. That began a long association with the company that he and his wife Peggy bought in ’92. Peggy will continue to run the company.               

I could always count on Dick for a straight assessment of the E&S world. He was a gentleman, and our business is poorer without him.               

If you get a chance and you knew either Bruce or Dick, drop Susan Hicks or Peggy Jones a note of something you remember about them.

Cheers,

Robin Ashton
Publisher