Editors' Note: Dollar Thrifty Auto Group announced its acquisition by Hertz after Oklahoma Magazine's press time.

Four years ago, Dollar Thrifty Auto Group barely had a nickel to its name. A perfect storm of financial disasters – among them a staggering $2.5 billion in debt, plummeting stock, customer service woes, and a $250 million bill to Chrysler that was sitting unpaid – brought the auto group’s global empire to the edge of utter ruin and threatened to deal a major blow to Tulsa’s economy.

“When it rains, it pours,” says Scott Thompson, Dollar Thrifty’s chairman, president and CEO.

So how, in four short years, has Dollar Thrifty gone from nearly being kicked off the New York Stock Exchange to one of the best-performing stocks on the market? Nothing less than sea change, it turns out.

“When a new management team came on board in late 2008 to oversee the turnaround of the company, we based the turnaround’s foundation on respect for diversity of opinion, dedication to change, measured risk taking, and maximum commitment and effort,” Thompson says. “The company diversified its fleet to include a variety of auto manufacturer suppliers, put in place a much leaner corporate structure and tried to be nimbler in decision making.”

According to Thompson, specific initiatives included downsizing and streamlining (and eliminating) top management positions, closing unprofitable locations and improving Dollar Thrifty’s fleet capabilities. And looking at the company’s most recent numbers, it’s clear that the strategy worked a financial miracle.

“In 2011, Dollar Thrifty reported the best year in the company’s history, with $303.2 million in Corporate Adjusted EBITDA, compared to a $2.3 million loss in 2008,” Thompson says. “The DTG stock has gone from below $1 a share in October 2008 to where it is today in the mid-$70s.

“Certain outside factors certainly helped,” Thompson admits. “The residual on used cars improved significantly. Travel volumes stabilized, and pricing in the industry generally improved. We also were lucky that Chrysler was able to fully satisfy its account receivable and become a healthy supplier for Dollar Thrifty. Never underestimate the power of luck.”

And never underestimate the power of employee dedication, too, he says. “Dollar Thrifty’s 5,900 employees have been loyal, hardworking and deserve the lion’s share of the credit for our performance.”

“Everyone was very concerned,” says long-time employee Sandy Martin, Dollar Thrifty’s director of e-marketing and Administration in Global Marketing and e-commerce. “We knew that we were really struggling, and many organizational changes were being made. We had to deal with the emotions of losing good work relationships, the uncertainty of our own futures and taking on new responsibilities, all while attempting to execute the ‘turnaround plan’ being presented to us.

“I was very impressed with how all employees, especially the management team, came together and fought hard,” Martin continues. “We continue to fight that hard every day. I think it really showed what Dollar Thrifty is made of – worldwide, not just here in Tulsa. 

“Communication is what helped us get through it all – everyone was open and honest, we worked together and we had the same goal.”

It’s no secret that the Tulsa economy has breathed a sigh of relief since Dollar Thrifty emerged from financial dark ages. Mike Neal, president and CEO of the Tulsa Metro Chamber, says Dollar Thrifty is an integral member of the Tulsa business community.

“Dollar Thrifty is a valued corporate citizen and contributes significantly to the Tulsa region’s economic development success,” he says. “We look forward to continued success from this leading company.” He also notes that Dollar Thrifty is a partner in the Tulsa Metro Chamber-led Tulsa’s Future economic development plan, “which has a goal of boosting high-value, primary jobs and capital investment in northeast Oklahoma.”

Thompson says that Dollar Thrifty also plays an important philanthropic role in the Tulsa community, but that above all, “the most important thing we can and are doing is to run the company in a manner that the community can be proud of and so that our employees can feel comfortable that their jobs will never again be at risk due to a financial crisis.”

With the recent rags-to-riches metamorphosis Dollar Thrifty has undergone, Thompson is exuberant about the group’s future. “We believe Dollar Thrifty is in the best competitive position in its history as a result of the strength of its balance sheet, improvements in technology and a dedicated workforce,” he says. “There are new initiatives every week as we create the company’s future. We think there is more to the story, and we are looking forward to reporting it as it unfolds.”
 

Two of our state’s most significant contributions to the pop music scene, blues-rocker Elvin Bishop and world-renowned drummer Jim Keltner, share some interesting parallels. Both were born in 1942: Keltner in Tulsa, Bishop in southern California. When Bishop was 10, his family moved to Tulsa. When Keltner was 13, his family moved to southern California.

They are alike in at least one other way: Neither man began his music career in Oklahoma. After graduating from Tulsa’s Will Rogers High School, Bishop went off to the University of Chicago on a full scholarship, ultimately finding the city’s blues scene more compelling than studying physics. Keltner, on the other hand, set his sights early on baseball instead of music, pitching a no-hitter while still in little league. And when he did start drumming seriously, he far preferred jazz to rock ‘n’ roll.

And although nothing he did in Tulsa indicated that he would grow up to become one of the leading drummers in all of rock, there was perhaps a portent or two.

“My dad was in the Akdar Shrine Drum Corps,” Keltner recalls. “The first time I ever saw him play was when my mom took us to a parade. I was sitting on the curb, and I could hear the sound of the drums coming down the street. I remember I started getting chills as it got closer. And as they walked past us, I saw my dad playing his snare drum, and then this enormous, big, funky sound was marching down the street right past me.

“That was probably the game-changer right there,” he adds. “I fell in love with the whole thing. It floored me. I think it was for that reason that my dad took me to one of their rehearsals later.”

Held in the basement of Tulsa’s Akdar Shrine Temple, the rehearsal, remembers Keltner, was full of men puffing on cigars, drinking Scotch and regaling one another with off-color jokes. “To this day,” he says, “when I smell cigar smoke and booze in a club or something, it takes me right back there.” The 12-year-old sat and listened to them practice, and when they were done, he picked up his dad’s sticks and recreated the exact cadence they’d been working on.

“I don’t remember being surprised,” Keltner says. “But it surprised them a lot.”

His father brought the snare home, setting it up in a closet. “It’s odd, but it was a real personal kind of sound for me in there, with all the clothes hanging and everything,” Keltner recalls. “I gave my little sister Judy a spoon and I told her, ‘Hit the edge of the head here like this – just go, one, two, three four, one, two, three four.’ She’d play that for me, and I’d play the cadence against it. It was the first little contrapuntal thing I remember doing, and it was totally fascinating to be able to hear that and feel that.”

His dad bought him a drum set soon after, and the family stayed in Tulsa long enough for Keltner, then a seventh grader, to play in the Roosevelt Junior High School orchestra and take a few lessons from noted local drummer Charles Westgate.

But if music was something that brought Keltner and his family closer together, it was also splitting his mom and dad apart. His mother’s brother, Willie “Smokey” Mendoza, was the bassist for Johnnie Lee Wills, who was then fronting the house band at Cain’s Ballroom. Keltner’s dad was working two jobs, keeping him busy day and night, and his young wife loved to go out and dance, especially to Wills’ western swing. It was not a recipe for marital harmony. It did, however, lead to their move west.

“They left Oklahoma because of so many crazy problems,” he explains, “like my mom having another life, and my dad working two jobs. They were going to divorce. I’d wake up in the morning, and I’d be hearing nothing but fights, because my dad worked the night shift and my mother had been out dancing.”

So, in August 1955, Keltner recalls, “We pulled out of our driveway on Woodrow Place in Tulsa with three things in a little trailer behind Dad’s new Chevy: our clothes in suitcases, my drum set and a TV set. You would think that music was my destination, but in reality it wasn’t. There was nothing to portend that. What I was, was a baseball player.”

That changed, however, when they reached southern California. Keltner’s father, a painter, landed a foreman’s job at the Santa Anita racetrack, and the family settled in Pasadena. But one day when Keltner was on the baseball field, he started breaking out in hives. Exertion and sweating, it turned out, was the cause.

“So what was I going to do?” he asks. “Sports was out of the question for me at that point, and I was already playing music. I was in a dance band called the Moonglows, a little combo with trombone, trumpet, alto sax, clarinet, piano, bass and drums. My first professional gig was at Pasadena’s Jefferson Recreation Center. My mom had a picture, which I have hanging in my house now, with a dollar bill at the bottom. It says, ‘Jim’s first dollar.’”

By the time his junior year came along, he’d discovered jazz. “That’s the way I was coming up,” he says. “I was a jazz player. I was a jazz lover. I couldn’t hear any kind of rock ‘n’ roll that excited me at all.”

He married right out of high school, kept playing jazz, and took a job at a local music store, where he also gave drum lessons. He was behind the counter one day when Gary Lewis walked in and asked if he could take a few lessons.

“He’d already had a big hit, ‘This Diamond Ring,’ and I gave him four or five lessons,” remembers Keltner. “Then one day, he said to me, ‘You know what? I’m going to play the guitar in front of the band. Why don’t you be my drummer?’”

At the time, Keltner was making $85 a week playing jazz, teaching and working at the store. Lewis offered him $250.

“So I flipped out and did it,” laughs Keltner. “Got my hair cut, shaved my moustache and became this cute little rock ‘n’ roll guy.” 

Through Lewis, Keltner met fellow Tulsa native Leon Russell, who was producing the Gary Lewis and the Playboys sessions. Russell had stocked the Playboys with Tulsans, including guitarist Tommy Tripplehorn and bassist Carl Radle, and Keltner was soon palling around with them and other hometown boys who’d come to the West Coast in search of a music career,

Keltner certainly found his, as even a cursory glance at his biography will tell you. From John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr to the Stones and Pink Floyd, Keltner can put his roster of musical collaborators up against anyone’s.

And while that career may not have started in Tulsa, as was the case with so many of his contemporaries and friends, Oklahoma certainly influenced, and continues to influence, his position in rock music’s stratosphere.

“To me, Tulsa represents everything that I am in my flesh and bones,” Keltner says. “Being born in Tulsa in 1942 to a great Okie man and a little Mexican girl – that’s who I am. That’s what you hear when you hear me play. Oklahoma is more than just the place I lived. It’s my musical home. It’s my heart’s home.”