GLEASON CRANES, one of the biggest names in crane distribution and rental, is shutting down after 50 years in business. With a debt structure that became unmanageable, the US company decided to cease operation. Employees have all been let go while Bob Gleason and his son-in-law Phil Rice wrap up the business.

Gleason has been a leading distributor for Grove for more than 30 years. Grove has now taken out the spare parts and moved them to North Central Crane, the Manitowoc company store in Chicago. Bob Hixon, Grove vice president for North American crane sales, said no decision had been taken on whether North Central would be given the Grove account.

Hixon said that Grove had not had to take back any cranes as these belonged to finance houses.

Stuart Anderson writes:

Arguably, over the course of the past 50 years, more people have known the name of Gleason Cranes than any other crane rental company in the world. This is the legacy of Bob Gleason and the team of dedicated professionals that he led. The Chicago-based business, founded in 1952 declared Chapter 7 bankruptcy on 22 January.

That Gleason Cranes has sold more hydraulic cranes than any other crane distributor in the world is beyond doubt. In one year during the late 1970s the company sold more than 600 hydraulic cranes. In many ways Gleason was a pioneer and innovator. He was not willing to accept the traditional restraints of distributor territories or being restricted to the product lines of a single supplier. Before the auto industry had multi-franchise car supermarkets, Gleason had a crane supermarket. When other crane and equipment distributors simply retailed machinery, Gleason had a thriving rental business. When other dealers stayed within their assigned territories, Gleason was not just nationwide but worldwide.

Gleason didn’t establish a network of branches to represent his far-flung customer interests, though there were early adventures in Germany (with Hans Liebherr amongst others) and Houston. Gleason learned that he did not need bricks and mortar to support cranes – no matter where they worked – he needed dedicated, experienced service technicians, vehicles and parts. Whether it was supplying cranes for the Alaska pipeline or to Aramco in Saudi Arabia, demanding customers worldwide learned that Gleason’s support was quite simply the best.

Gleason was a pioneer of the crane rental industry and many of the world’s leading contractors came to rely on Gleason. At any one time, Gleason had cranes working with customers in more than 30 states across the USA as well as throughout Latin America and the rest of the world.

In recent years, Gleason Cranes has been best known as a Grove Crane distributor of more than 30 years standing. But over the course of its history, it has been the number one worldwide distributor for P&H, Clark Austin-Western, Clark Lima, Sargent and of course, Grove. It was as a distributor for the small US crane and excavator maker Sargent Engineering Co (later acquired by Warner & Swasey) in the mid-1960s that Bob Gleason suggested to its young president Dave Ghysels that he put the operator’s cab on the rotating upper of a new 15 ton rough terrain he was developing. It was the world’s first swing-cab RT.

Bob Gleason has never been one for press exposure, speeches or conventions. Often it would be Bob’s brother Marty, or his son-in-law Phil Rice, the widely respected company president, that represented the public face of Gleason Cranes. Or it would be loyal professionals such as Mike Kearney, Ken Martinique and others before them that invariably represented the cream of the business.

J. Martin Benchoff, president of Grove from 1968 to 1987, enjoyed a long friendship and business relationship with Bob Gleason. Said Benchoff: ‘I consider Bob Gleason one of the great cranemen of the world. Bob was a great help in building Grove Manufacturing Company from its modest beginnings to its peak in the early 1980s when it commanded better than 50% of the hydraulic crane market. He has my utmost respect.’