Fleet Management News & Business Info | Commercial Carrier Journal
Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/265903
COMMERCIAL CARRIER JOURNAL | MARCH 2014 63 I t was an ending no one foresaw. Mere weeks after being diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumor, Jerry Thrift – a giant of a man with an outsized passion for learning, mentoring and sharing his love of the science of maintenance – was gone. Thrift's co-workers at Ryder Sys- tem and industry colleagues at The Technology and Maintenance Coun- cil were shocked not only at the sud- denness of his death but also at the void left by this quiet but influential individual and were left to consider his accomplishments. For his wife of 39 years, Pat, and their daughters, Micah and Kortney, and granddaughter, Harper, the loss was profound: a father and – now – a grandfather gone far too soon. But if anything, Jerry Thrift had been unself- ish with every aspect of his outsized heart and personality. He'd had a worldview that focused on both faith and family. In Thrift's outsized em- brace, "family" included not just Pat and his beloved daughters, but also his company and an entire industry. FORMATIVE YEARS Born in 1952, Thrift was the eldest son of a working-class family in Savannah, Ga. His father, Foster, was a boiler- maker at the local paper mill, while his mother, Reba, was a homemaker until Jerry and his younger brother, Ricky, were older, when she reentered the workforce as an administrative assistant. Jerry Thrift's legacy and inspiration live on in the coworkers and colleagues who named him CCJ's first-ever posthumous Career Leadership Award recipient BY JACK ROBERTS Jerry loved TMC. It was an organization of like-minded people to him. – Pat Thrift