LEBANON — At one point, the companies owned and overseen by Richard S. Daniels employed more than 300 people: bus drivers, truck drivers, managers, mechanics and other personnel needed to keep his fleets of trucks and buses on the road.
But Daniels operated without much fanfare, preferring instead to make sure he was taking care of his customers and employees and doing a good job. He was an active owner of his companies, and a risk-taker. When the former P&C supermarket warehouse in White River Junction came up for sale in 1999, he purchased it, even though he wasn’t exactly in the warehousing business at the time.
“It was 220,000 square feet and it was completely empty,” Julie Lyford, the older of Daniels’ two daughters, said in a phone interview.
“ ‘What are we supposed to do with this?’ ” Lyford and others asked him, “and he said, ‘Fill it.’ ”
The warehouse on Old River Road is one of the biggest buildings in the Upper Valley that people know the least about. It’s bigger than Dartmouth College’s sprawling Hopkins Center for the Arts, which contains about 175,000 square feet, and it’s surrounded by parking for trucks. It’s now the cornerstone of the businesses that bear Daniels’ name or initials.
“I believe taking the chance and purchasing the warehouse we currently call home was probably one of his brighter, shining moments,” Peter Daniels, Richard’s younger brother, said.
The start of Daniels’ successful business career was marked by tragedies and a need to make his work pay off.
Daniels died Jan. 19, after a period of declining health. He was 81, and had been involved in running his businesses until last June, when his health and cognitive decline precluded going to the office.
He grew up in West Lebanon, where his father, Reginald Daniels, operated Daniels Sales and Service, an International truck dealership, located first on Glen Road, where the family lived, and later on Mechanic Street at the location now occupied by Roberts Auto Service.
“That’s where Richard cut his teeth,” Peter said.
He took after his father, and came to love working on mechanical things and on doing a job the right way.
After graduating from West Lebanon High School in 1957, he took a job driving for Decato Brothers Trucking. He probably earned a commercial drivers license at 17 or 18 and was driving professionally by the age of 20.
He loved the trucking life, being on the road and meeting people. He would drive to places that other drivers didn’t much like — crowded industrial destinations around New York City, for example.
“If people had the confidence in him to do jobs like that, he really kind of rose to the top,” Peter said.
While he was still a young man, Daniels experienced in a few years the deaths of his younger brother Robert, in a motorcycle accident; his infant son, who died in his crib; and his father, of cardiac arrest. When his brother died, Daniels had to call the Maine State Police to find his parents, who were on vacation with Peter, who was then 3 or 4, Lynn Pierce, Daniels’ younger daughter, said. And when his father died, in 1966, his mother was still raising a child.
That was the year he and his then-wife, Anna Daniels, started RSD Transportation Inc., with a single truck and trailer. They expanded at a time when the interstate highways were being built through the Upper Valley. He needed the businesses to be successful, both for his own young family and for his mother, Pierce said.
“It was my father who was left to pick up the pieces,” she said.
“That was a pretty bleak time for my parents, for sure,” Lyford said. “I often remember my parents coming into my bedroom at night, just to make sure I was breathing.”
Daniels had a knack for taking calculated risks that paid off, a business style that put him at odds with his wife and partner, Pierce said. Where she wanted to pay for things as they went, Richard was a charismatic expansionist.
“I think my mom knew where every penny was,” Pierce said.
Their differences led them to divorce in the 1970s. Anna Daniels, who died last March, had a successful career as a real estate broker. They didn’t speak for nearly 30 years, but reconciled over their shared love for their grandkids, Pierce said.
Richard remarried, first to a woman Pierce said they don’t talk about, then to Laura (Rice) Daniels, who survives him.
As the business grew, Daniels kept adding to it. He took on the maintenance of Lebanon’s school buses, and built up to the point where he had busing contracts with 16 or 17 school districts, mainly in Vermont, and ran four or five bus-maintenance operations.
He also took in Daniels Transportation Corp., a moving and contract shipping business that had belonged to his uncle Raymond Daniels. This gave Daniels a foothold in another aspect of the trucking industry. RSD Transportation is an over-the-road carrier, picking up and delivering freight mainly in New England and the Northeast. Contract shipping involves pick-up and delivery on a set schedule, and Daniels Transportation ships U.S. mail and also has had contracts with businesses like Kleen Laundry, a Lebanon-based commercial laundry service that closed in 2019.
In addition, Daniels started a business that leases trucks. In that role, he acted as a trusted advisor to people who were starting or expanding trucking-dependent businesses in the Upper Valley.
After purchasing the warehouse, Daniels sold the bus operation to First Student in 2004, though RSD still does a robust business in maintaining buses. That transaction made the company dramatically smaller, cutting around 240 bus drivers and managers. The business is now a warehousing operation supported by trucking, Lyford said.
The companies were his life, Lyford said, and there were times he loaned them money to meet payroll.
As his businesses changed, Daniels did, too. He remained fascinated by all things mechanical, spending years piloting planes and helicopters and supporting Peter’s race team, but he also became versed in the mechanics of business. He helped start a small bank, Landmark Bank, which was sold to Lake Sunapee Bank.
“I think there is probably a pretty vast group of Upper Valley businesspeople who would come to Richard when they had a big decision to make,” Peter said.
Daniels also was a longtime member of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, at lodges in Lebanon, Hartford and St. Johnsbury. He purchased and later sold the Elks lodge in Hartford Village.
He went about this work without calling a lot of attention to himself. He sold a former bus depot on Route 12A in West Lebanon to Hannaford. He owned the White River Junction railroad roundhouse and built a new structure there after the old one burned down.
Otherwise, he wasn’t much in the news, and he looked after his community in the same way, adopting families at Christmas and making donations in his mother’s name.
“He always had a sense of responsibility for other people,” Pierce said. “He always knew, at the end of the day, he had to keep it rolling for everybody.”
Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.
Correction
Ellie Laraway was an assistant manager at RSD Leasing. An earlier photo caption with this story incorrectly described who he worked for.
