Our Company

History

Charles K. Bowen

In 1975, Consolidated Freightways announced it would end its Freightliner subsidiary's 25-year marketing agreement with White Motor Company. In July of 1977, Charles K. Bowen, President and CEO of today's The Around The Clock Freightliner Group LP, made the shrewdest business decision of his career. After 15 years with White Motor Company, Bowen, then a 34-year-old Fleet Sales Representative, made his decision to apply for a position with the company who had acquired the franchise for the soon-to-be-built Freightliner dealership in Oklahoma City.

Bowen recounts his amazement when, without benefit of either management or financial experience, he applied for, and was hired as, the General Manager of what would become Oklahoma City Freightliner. He says, more amazing than that was the fact that a few very special people were either courageous or crazy enough to leave their good jobs at White Motor Company and follow him to what was, at that time, an empty 10-acre field. "We began hiring the very best people available and, working as a team, we built Oklahoma City Freightliner," says Bowen. Since the beginning, Bowen has never looked back. In 1983, he purchased Oklahoma City Freightliner from the company for whom it had been built. After deciding it was time to strategically expand the company's presence in the southwest, he acquired the Freightliner dealerships in both Dallas and Tulsa in 1991, and in 1993, made the company's latest acquisition of the Freightliner dealership in Fort Worth, thus completing the ATC Freightliner Group as it exists today. Bowen often says, "Im the luckiest dealer in the world. In 1977, I was a just a young man with a dream. Over the years, the greatest group of employees ever assembled has turned that dream into a reality."