Family Values & The Value of NAPA

JAY LEMON TAKES GAVEL AS BOARD OF DIRECTORS CHAIR

BY TY JOHNSON
EDITORIAL DIRECTOR

Growing up, vacations were a little different for Jay Lemon, who today serves as president of Haskell Lemon in Oklahoma City.

“We’re a family business, and Haskell was always big on bringing family to the meetings,” Lemon said. “NAPA always has meetings in really cool places, so some of it was vacation, some fun, some business, some social, and, looking back, all of those benefits combined are part of what we consider the value of NAPA.”

Lemon said his first meeting was in San Diego, decades ago, when he was in middle school. While the first half-dozen or so meetings were all about fun, it was when he started working in the business that the breakout sessions and educational programming began to interest him as much as the destinations.

Familiarity through the IMPACT Leadership Group, then known as Hot Mixers, meant Lemon and other emerging leaders like him would come together multiple times a year to discuss the industry and catch up on life.

“After four or five years of coming and seeing the same faces, you start really becoming friends and interested in other people’s lives,” he said. “Then you start becoming a little bit more involved in some of the committees and start to feel like, ‘Well, I can give back a little bit.’”

Giving back to the organization led Lemon on a path through opportunities that ultimately resulted in his installation as Chair of the Board during the NAPA Annual Meeting in Scottsdale.

Presiding over the board and working with NAPA leadership to set priorities are in the job description, but Lemon put it plainly: “My role is really wishing to be the industry’s biggest cheerleader.”

THE LEMON LEGACY

“My grandparents, Haskell and Irene, formed our company in 1948 when a lot of this country’s infrastructure was really developing,” Lemon explained, noting that the end of World War II signified a new era in road construction as the nation was emerging from its war-driven economy.

“We’re a family business, and Haskell was always big on bringing family to the meetings,” Lemon said. “NAPA always has meetings in really cool places, so some of it was vacation, some fun, some business, some social, and, looking back, all of those benefits combined are part of what we consider the value of NAPA.”

– Jay Lemon, NAPA Board of Directors Chair

“This country was flourishing, people were trying to expand, and everybody wanted a car,” Lemon said, explaining that the roads that crisscrossed the country were largely unpaved. “People were trying to figure out how to get from the east coast to the west coast and tired of riding on dirty roads and getting stuck in the mud.”

His grandparents, Depression-era sweethearts, had held various jobs throughout the 1930s and 1940s, enduring the tough times with positions that rarely lasted more than a year. Then, they made a prediction.

“They figured there was always going to be the need for road construction,” he said, noting that’s one thing about the industry that has not changed in eight decades. “We’ve got a safe career choice, all of us in the asphalt pavement industry, because there’s no shortage of needs for everything that we’re doing collectively.”

The next generation of family ownership brought in Lemon’s father, Larry, as well as his brother-in-law, Pete Wert. Lemon’s cousin, Ken Wert, and his brother, Bob, were part of the third generation of leaders, with the fourth generation, led by Jack Lemon, now working in the business.

Lemon said that whether the holdings are privately held or publicly owned, most businesses in the industry are multigenerational operations.

“They figured there was always going to be the need for road construction,” he said, noting that’s one thing about the industry that has not changed in eight decades. “We’ve got a safe career choice, all of us in the asphalt pavement industry, because there’s no shortage of needs for everything that we’re doing collectively.”

– Jay Lemon, NAPA Board of Directors Chair

“We have a lot of employees who their dads or moms worked for us, and we’ve got some third-generation examples that are with us, too, so a little bit of what we do really gets in your blood,” he said. “It’s not real sexy to tell people we build roads or stand out in the middle of a highway in traffic, but if you do it for a little bit, it gets your adrenaline flowing. And people love building things. They love seeing the betterment of not just a road or a city, but whatever we go build, it seems like the area around it grows and prospers.

“Our family has always attended NAPA Annual and come home with more than we’ve expected,” Lemon said. “In Oklahoma, we’re not usually the trendsetter nationwide. We can go to NAPA meetings and we can learn about what our friends in Seattle are facing or in Virginia or somewhere else, and in two or three years, that’s exactly what’s going to be going on in our marketplace, too.”

Named for Jay’s father, the Larry H. Lemon Awards annually recognize the highest-scoring Quality in Construction (QIC) projects that use less than 50,000 tons of asphalt.

Larry was instrumental in creating the rating system for NAPA’s QIC program, which uses qualitative analysis through data and test results to determine winners. He served as Chairman of the Board in 2010.

Learn more about the 2025 Larry H. Lemon Award winners.