Schwing America associates took time out from World of Concrete this year to honor Gary Nichols with the “Tom Anderson Lifetime Achievement Award,” the company’s top award acknowledging a person’s outstanding contributions to Schwing and the concrete pumping industry.
Tom O’Malley, Schwing senior vice president for sales and marketing, presented the award, citing the many achievements made by Nichols, including a history in concrete that spans more than five decades.
Nichols’ roots in concrete pumping are as humble as they come: starting as a wash boy for Ralph’s Concrete Pumping in Seattle in 1966. After a stint in the Army that included 14 months in Viet Nam, Gary returned to Washington state where he took a job as a pump operator for McDonald Cranes—he was operations manager a mere five years later.
By 1976, he founded PACPUMP Concrete Pumping, but facing a recession that hit Seattle hard, relocated to Atlanta with half the fleet and started a new company called Pumpco. Within two years of moving there, he started Nichols Concrete Equipment Company in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
In the mid-1990s, he established Premier Concrete Pumping with his then-competitor but good friend Pat Inglese; they remained partners for 23 years and still remain good friends. Inglese said: “They’ve written books about guys that have done less than Gary Nichols.”
According to O’Malley, throughout Nichols’ career, he proved himself an industry leader and a great promoter of concrete pumping. “Gary was well-known for forming relationships with ready mixed producers in an effort to make more pumpable mixes,” he said. “As a Schwing customer, he was always driving product development. His fingerprints can be found all over a number of Schwing products, including the Big Rock Valve and the 47 SX.”
Nichols is only the ninth person to receive the Tom Anderson Lifetime Achievement Award.