Palm Pilot

Big Builder Magazine's April 2006 cover story about Palm Harbor Homes, by Lisa Marquis Jackson

Larry Keener steered his company - with energy to spare - from manufactured housing's throes into modular's trendy opportunity.

Larry Keener's life flashed before his eyes one February morning five years ago on a Texas interstate highway. So did the lives of two of his most trusted colleagues, Dwayne Miller and Bert Kessler. They came that close to being three I-30 statistics, as they sped westbound from company offices in Addison to their manufacturing plant in Burleson.

Keener, president of Palm Harbor Homes, was driving, holding court and using the 50-plus-mile trip to pump Miller, the company's now-retired president of manufacturing, and Kessler, Palm Harbor's vice president of engineering, for ideas.

"We were talking about ways we could take advantage of engineering and efficiencies we had implemented, but that no one really knew were there," recalls Kessler. "We wanted to enhance our EnerGmiser program and let people know that energy-efficiency isn't all about how much R-value of the insulation you install. You have to look at the house as a whole system and see how it performs."

As fate would have it, amid their three-way brain jam, a dump truck suddenly swerved across the highway lanes, berreling right at their car. Instinct, reflexes, dumb luck, whatever, the crash they all saw coming never came. "Luckily, we were in a safe car," Kessler recalls. Download the whole article in PDF.