Category: Inductees

Five. That’s how many customers Don Brock, chairman of Astec Industries, tries to reach each day. It’s a daily goal for Brock, and one he encourages others within his company to achieve each day. “Don is an engineer and technical by background, but he has a great business acumen,” says Joe Vig, president of KPI-JCI…

Neil Schmidgall didn’t invent the portable conveyor, but his customers and employees say he made significant advancements to perfect them in the 1990s. Schmidgall, founder of Superior Industries in Morris, Minn., led the company as it developed a number of portable equipment advancements, including the FD Axle, which is still influential to the industry today.…

A high-volume aggregate producer doesn’t become a top U.S. producer overnight. A series of growth-related moves are usually made, and those moves are typically made over a period of years, even decades. New Enterprise Stone & Lime Co. Inc., a Pennsylvania-based aggregate producer with more than 90 years of history, has followed that model of…

Two hundred years ago, building a two-mile macadam road was a daunting task. Today, it’s not a problem because of Eli Whitney Blake’s stone crusher. Born in 1795 in Westborough, Mass., Blake had the family talent for creative thinking and devising innovative solutions to challenging tasks. His father was a farmer, and his uncle, Eli…

Glen Barton was destined to “bleed yellow” since he was five years old, when his father purchased the first family tractor. “At six or seven, I could drive it and do everything you could do with a farm tractor,” says Glen Barton, retired chairman and CEO of Caterpillar. “It was sort of in your blood.”…