(This article first appeared in the July print edition of the Hendersonian.)
Gary Crawford had been a rural electric lineman in the early 1970s when his father-in-law, J.T. Southard, asked whether he would be interested in running his logging crew. Crawford agreed.
Awhile later, Southard asked Crawford if he would want to take over a wrecker service on South Green Street from owner Eldon “Pig” Rideout, who was having health issues.
“I told J.T. I didn’t know anything about the wrecker business,” Crawford recalled. “He said, ‘You didn’t know anything about the logging business, either.’”
And so, Crawford and his wife, Brenda, in 1976 bought out Rideout’s towing service and his full-service station at 1705 S. Green St.
This year marks Crawford’s 50th year in the wrecker business, and it’s considerably different than a half-century ago.
Back in ’76, “We had five old trucks,” including one that had been wrecked and more or less ran sideways down the road, he said.
“We ran the only wrecker service in Henderson County and most of Union County” at the time with three drivers and himself, Crawford said in an interview at his office. He kept the Rideout name, and later incorporated as Rideout Service Center.
“Everyone knew him and nobody knew him, and I respected Pig a lot,” Crawford explained.
Today, what is now called Rideout’s Tri-State Towing & Recovery has a fleet of some 50 trucks operating out of Henderson and Evansville, many of them capable of recovering heavy vehicles from mishaps — like a 70,000-pound loaded cement truck that overturned and was half-submerged in a lake in February 2025. That recovery landed Tri-State on the cover American Towman magazine along with a feature story with details on how the five-man crew rescued the vehicle.
Tri-State has likewise been featured on the cover of Tow Times magazine for using multiple inflatable air cushions and other equipment to right an overturned 78,000-pound semi-trailer in Henderson.
And in 2023 it won a Donnie Cruse Recovery Award (named for a leader in the international towing and recovery industry) for leading a multi-company recovery of a 163,000-pound mining truck that had slipped off a heavy-haul transporter in far-western Kentucky that year, securing another feature story in American Towman.
“We’ve done a tremendous amount of recovery” that requires heavy-duty equipment and a lot of know-how by his drivers and crews, Crawford said.
A young Gary Crawford could scarcely have imagined such accomplishments by his company and crews.
“I was just a kid,” he said.
“My first semi rollover was behind Palmer’s (filling station on outer Second Street),” Crawford recalled. “It was a load of pipes. I wondered, what do I do? I called Pig, and he said, ‘I’ll meet you out there’” and he talked Crawford through the multiple steps of vehicle recovery.
“It worked like a charm,” he said.
Beyond that, Crawford said Rideout gave him sterling advice for running a wrecker business.
“Pig told me three things: Show up on time. Have a good driver. And have a good piece of equipment, and you’ll never go out of business.”
To this day, “We help drivers get some of the highest certifications in the nation,” Crawford said.
“We have four or five drivers who do ambulance and fire (department) work on the side,” providing them EMT skills and other specialty knowledge that can be useful when dealing with wrecks, “especially when a rescue is involved,” such as the instance on one of the Twin Bridges when a semi ran over a stalled car, trapping a woman inside, Crawford said.
The wrecker service requires 24-hour, seven-day-a-week response capabilities, and for many years Rideout’s was a 24-hour filling station and mechanic service. That meant many long days and late nights for Crawford.
“I don’t know how she put up with me,” missing meals and having to get up in the middle of the night, he said, referring to his wife. “During the (2009) ice storm, I was not home for seven days. I slept in the truck.”
Crawford is quick to credit older men like attorney Ulvester Walker, Sheriff Charlie West and Palmer Oil founder Bill Palmer for their support and guidance, and to companies like Halliburton, Gibbs Die Casting, PB&S Chemical/Brenntag and others that became years-long customers for vehicle maintenance, mechanical repair and occasional towing.
One breakthrough was landing the towing contract for the city of Evansville some 20 years ago. “I worked for years to get the Evansville towing contract,” Crawford said. “… If you’re persistent enough — I think I just wore them out.”
“That was a real boost for us,” he said.
Tri-State is also now the towing contractor for Vanderburgh County and works jobs in western Kentucky, southern Indiana and southern Illinois, and sometimes beyond. He’s even sent equipment to help manufacturing plants set heavy machinery.
A couple of years ago, he was approached by the American Automobile Association — the national federation of motor clubs known as Triple-A — about becoming its towing service for this region.
Today, “We take 700 calls a month from AAA alone” — from jumping or installing batteries to changing flat tires to hauling a disabled vehicle to a garage, accounting for nearly half of the estimated 1,500 to 1,600 calls Tri-State gets monthly, Crawford said.
Being able to handle a wide range of calls means having not just tow trucks, but specialized wreckers with rotating booms as well as grain vacuums for cleaning up after overturned grain trucks, traffic control equipment, on-scene lighting for nighttime recoveries — even environmental response gear for responding to chemical spills.
“Environmental remediation has become big,” Crawford said.
Over the years, his business has included everything from radiator repair to selling bait; it still refills LP/propane tanks.
Some parts of the original business have been set aside. Selling gasoline didn’t generate much profit, so around 2000 Crawford had the underground fuel tanks taken out. But first he had to empty them. To do so, he painted a special price on the front window of the service station: 16.9 cents, harkening back to the early days of Rideout’s service station.
“We sold it out for 16.9 cents a gallon,” he said.
Later, Crawford phased out the 24-hour mechanic’s service because of the difficulty of finding round-the-clock help; today, his repair and maintenance service is limited to emergency vehicles, such as ambulances that require mechanics with special certifications.
In 2020, Crawford had the old service station demolished to make way for a new building that meets the changing needs of the business.
At age 75, he says he plans to keep working “until they run me out.”
“It’s great,” Crawford said. “You’re not doing the same thing every day. Every day is different.”
“It’s been a great business, it really has,” he said.
