Smith Coaches speeds toward future in spirit of its past

CELEBRATING 40 YEARS
Corey Smith couldn’t believe his eyes.
He did a double take and still thought, “Can’t be.”
    It happened along Interstate 15 near Willard Bay. Corey was with a group of tourists he was hauling to Yellowstone National Park.
    It was a serendipitous sight—especially given that Corey’s dad and mentor, Michael Edward “Ed” Smith, had passed away just a few months earlier, in January 2010.
    His dad, naturally, was on his mind all the time.
    There it sat, mothballed, marooned, inside the fence of a truck repair place along the highway.
    It was one of the very buses Corey’s father had started the family tour business with.
    It was, in fact, the very bus Corey learned to drive and haul his own passengers with.
    It was the very bus in which Corey would meet his future wife.
    “I stopped and wrote down the name of the business so I could call them,” he said. “I thought about it the whole trip.”
    Corey returned from the Yellowstone tour and Googled the name of the business. He found out who owned the bus.
    “The guy said he bought it in 1997 from a guy in St. George (the same person his father had sold it to so many years before).
    “From 1997 to 2010, he had it in storage at his home. He wanted to make an RV out of it, but never got around to it,” he said.
    Corey says he made a deal to buy the bus from the man, who agreed to sell it and even delivered it.
    That 1987 Eagle passenger bus sits alongside Corey’s Uintah Street office—his dad’s old home office and the tour company’s headquarters—in Helper today.
    This month marks the 40th anniversary of the opening of Smith Coaches, which Ed Smith started from scratch in 1978 with three buses.
    Corey recently shared some intimate details of the company’s history with Castle Country Living as a way of celebrating four decades in business.
From oil and gas to coal
    Ed Smith was raised in Fruita, in Wayne County, before it was part of the Capitol Reef National Park. His father, Corey’s grandfather, was a blacksmith there in the early days. The blacksmith shop still stands.
    Ed grew up with a work ethic honed by the hard labor required of young people of his generation, especially those from farming and ranching communities such as Fruita.
    When Ed grew older he started several businesses, including a gas station in Granger.
    Eventually he would move his family from the Salt Lake area to Helper, where he owned Ed’s Texaco—Swift Stop & Shop is there today.
    Ed also owned a Sinclair gas station in Price, across the street from the local jail.
    With ownership of the stations, Ed built relationships with gas and oil refining companies, including Quaker State, the oil refining company.
In 1976, Valley Camp and its four Utah coal mines were acquired by Quaker State Refining Co. of Pennsylvania. After a couple of years, the new owners knew they needed a better transportation system for delivering the three shifts of miners to and from the mines.
Ed spotted a good business opportunity.
Smith Coaches was born with the purchase of three, used 1965 MCI 5 buses acquired in Phoenix.
With the three buses, one each centrally located in three counties—Carbon, Emery and Sanpete—Ed began transporting coal miners starting in 1978.
As the mining industry slumped several years later, about the mid-1980s, and his buses grew idle, Ed decided to start a touring company.
He bought brand new buses, too—including that 1987 Eagle.
Building a business, one hurdle at a time
Ed started small: ski trips and gambling junkets to Las Vegas and Wendover.
“And it just grew from there,” Corey says.
Eventually, Ed was hauling tourists from Europe to local national parks.
He grew the business to a fleet of buses, made deals with senior centers and schools to haul student athletes and was on standby should someone need a passenger coach in a hurry.
Eventually, Corey would join Ed in the business after graduating from high school in 1991.
A brief period of turmoil in Ed’s personal life forced him to scuttle parts of the business for a short time. Father and son, nearly started over, starting again with a sole tour bus purchased new.
They would shortly rebuild the business and forge ahead.
By the 2000s, Smith Coaches had three luxury buses, clients from all over the world, and a steady business, all run out of that Uintah street office in Helper.
Corey has continued that tradition of hard work and steady growth.
40 years later
The three coaches Ed and Corey operated at the time of Ed’s death in 2010 have grown to seven luxury liners and three smaller mini-buses today.
While Helper remains the headquarters, Corey also has a winter operating base in Grand Junction.
He has 14 employees, manages tours all over the United States, and literally runs a global enterprise  from tiny Helper.
“I look up to him to this day,” Corey says of his dad. “He’s my mark (on which to judge success).”
Today, small ski ventures and Wendover gambling junkets are still done, but they run alongside music tours of New Orleans and Nashville. There are foliage jaunts and historical excursions as far east as Maine and Massachusetts.
Tourists from China, Japan and all over Europe book passage on Smith Coaches, enjoying luxury and comfort as they gander upon the West’s natural beauty.
Steady growth will also mark the next few years, Corey says.
He always buys his buses new, and never keeps them more than five years, which keeps Smith Coaches clients traveling in style year in and year out.
When Corey isn’t busy with his business, he lately enjoys helping his daughter race cars—he and Ed did much the same, but Corey stopped after his father’s death and only recently got back into the sport when his daughter expressed an interest.
A race car sits in a garage not far from that special bus parked outside.
That old Eagle, the one that holds all the memories and symbolizes the history of Smith Coaches, Corey isn’t quite sure what will eventually come of it—will he restore it, turn it into an RV himself, or keep it just as it is?
He doesn’t quite know yet. He’s still busy marveling at the fact he was reunited with it after all those years.