MAY SPOTLIGHT
Tracy Haslem

Tracy is an Asset Manager and joined JR Merit in 2019. “My journey at JR Merit is a little different than some. I was semi-retired, at home on my farm with my animals. My son, who also works here, suggested they give me a call for a role they were having some trouble filling. They called and we talked, and they asked if I could start on Monday. And six years later I’m still here.”

Tracy had a 27-year career in the printing logistics and warehousing business before coming to JR Merit, and before that owned a livestock business. “My college degree is in agriculture. I sold my livestock business to a veterinary group in Iowa and started working at a printing company as a forklift operator. It was the middle of winter and I didn’t want to feed cows in the snow, I figured I’d wait until Spring to figure out what to do with the rest of my life, so I got this job driving a forklift. After a short while they said, ‘You’re too smart for this, we have other positions. So, I moved up to another position, then another. I did everything from purchasing to logistics to transportation. For a 10-year period, I was buying a million pounds of paper a day, and had 27 semi-trucks on the road daily. It was fun and challenging. And then 27 years later I retired from the printing industry.

“My role at JR Merit involves all the things I did in my past life—warehousing, asset management, purchasing—just at a smaller scale. Coming here, I had a lot of experience to apply, not necessarily in construction but in manufacturing, and they parallel well.

“One way is in customer service. When you’re in manufacturing, you not only have external customers, you have internal customers, too. It’s the same thing at JR Merit. We provide information to accounting, project managers, and project engineers, make sure the field teams have the parts and tools they need to do their job successfully, and make sure those parts and tools are there on time with no delays. Scheduling is critical whether it’s manufacturing or construction—whether you’re operating in a building or constructing a hydro power plant, it’s all about getting the right parts and the right tools to the right people at the right time.”

Tracy’s favorite parts of his role at JR Merit are that no two days are alike, and the people. “I enjoy the group of people I work with in the office and field. Our field people have a tremendous amount of skill. We also have a great group of young employees here; they’ve done a great job with recruitment. Now, I’m a storyteller; I tell stories because they have a moral to them. And they listen to my stories because they see the reasons in them; they’re hearing things they didn’t learn in school. I enjoy learning from our young people, too. I bring the old school approaches of customer service and relationships, and with tech changing so fast and their skill levels with it, I learn from them, too. I feed off them and they feed off me.”

Tracy recalled a memorable story from his early days on the job at JR Merit. “I was here two weeks when a project manager brought me an oil cooler that had come out of the Lewis River Dam that needed to be cleaned and pressure tested. This thing had about 150 copper tubes running through it that were only about 3/8-inch diameter each that needed to be cleaned. And all it had on it was a nameplate that said Allis-Chalmers. Now being a farm boy, I knew Allis-Chalmers as a tractor-maker. They would sponsor a belt buckle commemorating the National Finals Rodeo; people would collect those belt buckles. But Allis-Chalmers quit making tractors in 1994; they were bought out by Massey-Ferguson.

“In my research into this oil cooler, I learned that Allis-Chalmers was the third-largest manufacturer of power equipment behind GE and Westinghouse, but they quit making power equipment in 1956. So, this oil cooler had to be at least 75 years old. I took it to shops to have people look at it and see what could be done to restore it. I even talked with the folks who bought the Allis-Chalmers intellectual property to see if I could get a manual. Well, they wanted too much money for that, so I kept looking. In the end, I found an oil cooler that was identical to the one I had, which would just bolt into place. So, we didn’t have to go through the hassle of cleaning and pressure testing the old one. I thought it was really interesting that 75 years later I found an oil cooler just like one that had been put in the dam 75 years prior.”

Tracy has his sights set on returning to retirement soon. “We found the right person to step into this role. I was glad to be part of the interview process; I really respect the culture at JR Merit, and it was really important to find someone who fit both the skills for this role and the culture.”

He’s looking forward to being back on his small farm with his wife of 39 years, Mary Jo, and their sheep. Mary Jo is a talented fiber artist and uses the sheep fleeces in her work. “We have some nationally competitive sheep and I look forward to being able to devote more time to them and promote them. We volunteer with the Grange, 4-H and FFA and value the time we spend mentoring the youth in their livestock projects.

“Our boys were involved in 4-H; that taught them a lot of life skills—management and financial skills. My oldest son, Troy, he’s a beautiful horse rider. I told him, ‘You’re a natural at this, don’t give up on it.’ He liked livestock better, but I told him he’d come back to horses at some point in his life. He went off to college to become a civil engineer, and one day he tells me, ‘I’m joining a sports club—I’m playing polo.’ See? I told him he’d be back.”