Sarah A. Miller/Tyler Morning Telegraph Construction continues Wednesday on the site of the Energy Center at Tyler Junior College West Campus in Tyler.

BY CASEY MURPHY, cmurphy@tylerpaper.com

After starting RPR Construction Co. Inc. with her late husband 31 years ago, Pat Pinkerton has no plans of stopping.

“I love construction,” the 65-year-old said Wednesday while standing at the work site of Tyler Junior College’s new Energy Center.

Mrs. Pinkerton, president of RPR, owns the company with her two daughters.

“We’ve always been one of the largest general contractors in the area because we have skilled forces under us,” she said, referring to sub-contractors they work with.

RPR specializes in commercial, industrial and institutional facilities. The company includes four entities — McKenzie Tile & Flooring, RPR Mechanical–Heating, Plumbing and Air Conditioner and RPR Industrial and RPR Client Services.

Mrs. Pinkerton and her late husband, Don Pinkerton, were high school sweethearts from their days at John Tyler High School and married in 1968. They moved to Dallas to work at Texas Instruments, where he worked as a draftsman and she as an administrative secretary in the engineering department.

The couple moved back to Tyler in 1971, and Pinkerton built apartment complexes and homes. Pinkerton grew up on construction sites, with his grandmother and mother building houses in Tyler, she said.

Pinkerton started RPR with Randy Rayford and C.B. Roberts in 1983.

When they started, they constructed primarily commercial buildings “but no job was too small for us to do,” Mrs. Pinkerton said. “Starting out, we would do just about anything.”

Pinkerton and his two partners worked on the job sites to have a paycheck to bring home, she said. While the men worked in the field, she stayed in the office, answering the phones, typing letters from Dictaphone tapes, manually posting and paying all invoices.

Pinkerton eventually bought out his two partners and became owner of the company. He moved his wife to the office next to his to ensure that she had a clear understanding of the business and financial side of the company, she said. Pinkerton was a Smith County commissioner with hopes of running for state senator, she said.

When Don Pinkerton died in his sleep at the couple’s ranch in San Saba in 2005, Mrs. Pinkerton became owner and president of RPR. She said she had several offers from others to buy the business.

“I wasn’t going to leave our team,” she said. “They’re my family.”

 

CHANGING WITH THE TIMES

When the economy took a downturn in the late 1980s, larger construction companies were slow but RPR remained busy with smaller projects and building relations with new clients.

Over time, they developed relationships and clients in the community to grow their business. There are 44 employees at RPR, many of which have been with the company for at least 20 years. She said RPR’s employees have a combined experience of more than five centuries.

Mrs. Pinkerton has seen many changes in the industry over the years.

When they started, there were no cellphones or fax machines used, and she kept job costs, calculated on a big adding machine, on a spread sheet. Subcontractors could not email or fax in their bids. Instead, they called them in and they were written on a yellow telephone bid tablet.

Michael Martin, RPR’s project manager for the Energy Center, said one of the biggest changes in the construction industry in Tyler over the years has been the competition. At one time, there were only three general contractors, and now there are six to eight, he said, adding that some are spinoffs of RPR.

Computers and technology also have changed, he said.

Mrs. Pinkerton said the project superintendents have iPads on the construction sites now and no longer have to carry big sets of paper plans with them. They also have cell phones instead of pagers to communicate.

Chuck Brown, project superintendent, who has worked for RPR for 15 years, said one of the biggest changes he has seen is the architecture of the facilities they build.

“It’s not an easy square box anymore,” Martin, who also has worked at RPR for 15 years, added.

During the 1990s, Mrs. Pinkerton left RPR to start Pat Pinkerton Homes. She bought a lot and built a spec home in 90 days, which sold the first week on the market, she said. During the next 14 months, she built three custom homes on Lake Tyler. Mrs. Pinkerton returned to RPR in 2000 to help her son-in-law, Donald Coe, start up McKenzie Tile & Flooring, a new division of the company.

Now at RPR, she does just about whatever needs to be done, from shopping for supplies to overseeing the financial and business side of the company.

Mrs. Pinkerton said she has no plans to retire anytime soon.

“I’ve always worked since I was 14,” she said, adding that her first job was selling produce out of the back of a truck. She also worked in a concession stand at a movie theater.

Her two daughters, Lori Coe and Amy Chesley, are co-owners and directors of the company with her and she hopes they will one day take over the business. Mrs. Coe has worked at RPR for about 17 years and is administrative secretary in the client service division and helps with marketing while her husband is a project manager.

 

PROJECTS

RPR has done 26 public school projects in 12 East Texas school districts. In Tyler, projects have been done by RPR for Clarkston, Rice, Owens and Austin elementary schools, Hubbard Middle School and several other schools.

They also have done projects for Kilgore College, The Brook Hill School, LaTourneau University, The University of Texas at Tyler, UT Health Northeast, The Salvation Army, Hospice of East Texas, XTO Energy, Southside Bank, Marvin United Methodist Church, First Baptist Church, East Texas Medical Center, Willow Brook Country Club, the city of Tyler, Smith County and many others.

In 2007, RPR began the reconstruction of an unoccupied space for the Luminant Academy. Luminant, a subsidiary of Energy Future Holdings Corp., formerly known as TXU Corp., expanded the space by 24,000 square feet and added a second floor.

RPR started construction on the three-story Energy Center building in February and plan to complete it before classes start there in January. RPR has about 25 specialized sub-contracting firms working with them on the project. There were about 50 workers on site on Wednesday.

The $8.1 million, three-story, 48,000-square-foot facility will adjoin the existing Skills Training Center, which opened in 2003. The Energy Center will be a steel structure with insulated metal panels, and will team with Luminant Academy, which opened in 2011.

Through the Energy Center, TJC will expand its power plant technology and the Luminant Academy, relocate the heating, air conditioning and refrigeration programs and expand the high school dual-credit programs with certification components.

“This is cutting edge,” Todd Colvin, who also works for RPR, said of the Energy Center. “This is a very high-tech building, from design to construction — every part of it.”

Martin said the infrastructure used for the technology that will be used in the facility is fascinating. There will be solar panels on the roof and a wind turbine to generate some of the electricity used in the building and for training purposes. A lot of the equipment in the building, such as the structural steel and air conditioning system, will be exposed so students can see how it works, he said.

“There’s not another building in Tyler that looks anything like it,” Brown said.

RPR also is constructing Encouragement FM in Tyler. The 10,960-square-foot facility on Old Jacksonville Highway will house broadcast studios for KVNE 89.5 and KGLY 91.3, as well as ministry outreach and a space for public events.

This summer, RPR started work to remodel classrooms and constructed a new gymnasium, kitchen, cafeteria/auditorium and music room at Rice and Dixie elementary schools. By this fall, the company hopes to finish the work, which includes constructing new administration areas, upgrading classrooms and technology, new computer labs and libraries.

“We are a team that strives to deliver a construction project that is excellence beyond expectations,” Mrs. Pinkerton said. “We are very proud to say that 85 percent of our construction projects are from repeat clients.”