LIMA — Denny Gallagher has bought and sold all kinds of equipment during the 40-plus years he’s been with Fritchie Asphalt and Paving. None, however, ended up having the unique story of a steamroller purchased 22 years ago.
The double-drum vibratory roller was sold and forgotten until Gallagher started talking with Richard Rudisil, the Jacobs Site HSE Manager at Lima Chemical Plant. From that conversation came a “connect-the-dots story” involving the two men, a Lima woman, and a piece of construction equipment purchased for $24,000 in 1995 from the McClean Co. of Columbus.
Rudisil is Dot No. 1. He was born in Wisconsin, moving at the age of 16 when his father retired from IBM and moved the family to Arkansas, where Richard graduated from high school and began active military duty in the U.S. Air Force. Following assignments at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas, and Fort Leonard Wood in the Missouri Ozarks, Rudisil was assigned to F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming.
Thus came Dot No. 2.
Lima native Christina Lines was attending Laramie County Community College in nearby Cheyenne. She and family had moved to Wyoming when she was 10. Christina would meet the Air Force man and they would fall in love and marry.
Dot No. 3 came back in Lima when the roller was sold in December 2008 with the help of Good Equipment Services. Good Equipment is in the commercial-equipment business and often brokers sales for used heavy equipment. The Elida-based company found a buyer, Customs Services and Solutions, located in Douglasville, Georgia, and the roller was on the move to nearby Savannah.
Dot No. 4 saw Rudisil on the move again as well, from air bases such as Mountain Home in Idaho, Offutt in Nebraska and on to Kunsan in Korea before a deployment to the Middle East landed him in Bagram, Afghanistan.
In November of 2011, Rudisil was assigned to the 455 Air Expeditionary Wing at Bagram Airfield, where he noticed a roller being used in some contractor work on Disney Drive. On that roller he couldn’t help but notice a clearly visible sticker that read, “Fritchie Asphalt Paving, Lima, Ohio.”
Recalls Rudisil, “Of course, I knew my wife was originally from Lima, and so that sticker was about the last thing I expected to see so far from home. I had a friend take a photo so that I could share it with her.”
Dot No. 5 came in 2014.
Rudisil decided that 19 years of service to his country was enough time away from a family that had grown to a daughter, Justyce, and a son, Peyton. He retired and began looking to make the successful transition from soldier to civilian, part of which, of course, meant finding employment.
Says Rudisil, “I saw there were great opportunities for jobs in Lima, and, of course, Christina, as a Lima native, was in line with that. Fortunately, I landed the site safety manager position for Jacobs here at Lima Chemical in September of 2014.”
As for how Gallagher and Rudisil connected, that’s the final Dot No. 6.
Last fall, Fritchie was contracted to do some work at Lima Chemical. Rudisil shared with Gallagher the photo of him and the roller that found its way to an ancient city in the Middle East, one founded by Alexander the Great before the birth of Christ. And all that time, it had that sticker that, somehow, was never removed — “Fritchie Asphalt Paving, Lima, Ohio.”
Sometimes, life’s roads traveled for both people and the equipment they use can stretch the limits of being incredible.
Such is the case for the former Christina Lines of Lima, who found her way to Cheyenne, Wyoming, to eventually meet a young military man from Wisconsin, by way of Arkansas, who eventually brought her and their children back to Lima following his service to his country, bringing with him a photo of himself and a certain double-drum vibratory roller that traveled some 800 miles from Lima to Savannah in 2008 just as a warm up to an even longer trek of more than 8,000 miles to Afghanistan.
Using math that may seem a bit fuzzy, one could calculate for Christina and Richard Rudisil and a piece of heavy equipment, the couple and steamroller traveled a total of some 20,000 miles to connect the geographical dots to Lima.
And, as for Gallagher, like his brother Dan but certainly not like 10 other siblings who wound up scattered across the country, well, he’s been here the whole time.
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