Jackie Lackie founded American Material Handling in 1979. He was 29, a traveling salesman who had spent the 1970s selling school supplies and gifts to small-town Arkansas stores, when he walked into the bigger warehouses in Little Rock and asked what they needed. The answer kept coming back the same: pallet racking, shelving, and containers. With no internet to lean on, he found the manufacturers at the public library and started a company. He named it American Material Handling for two reasons: his father had served in World War II and the family was deeply patriotic, and the "A" put the new business at the top of the phone book.
AMH opened with five employees and 2,500 square feet. The defining moment came in the downturn of 1987, when Jackie was forced to close every branch but Memphis. Customers going under needed to sell their equipment, and the ones who survived still needed to buy, just for less. Jackie started buying and selling used warehouse equipment, and that decision became the model AMH still runs on today: buy it, recondition it in-house, stock it, and ship it fast.
Over the next three decades he grew AMH into one of the region's leading material handling companies, weathering every downturn along the way and building a reputation for doing right by customers and employees alike. In 2019, at the company's 40-year mark, Jackie handed day-to-day leadership to his son Josh. His farewell note ended simply: "I hope I've been as good to you as you all have been to me," signed, "Forever grateful."
Jackie has never fully stepped away, and the company still runs on the standards he set: treat people well, keep your word, and give customers an honest deal. More than four decades on, that is still the heart of American Material Handling.