Pity Horatio Alger -- the 19th century "rags to riches" writer. He published more than a 120 novels based upon disadvantaged youth who pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps to make fortunes.

No one evoked the ideal of "the American Dream" better than Alger - telling tales of down and out youths rising beyond the economic status of their birth. Pity Alger because he died 15 years before the subject of one of the greatest rags to riches stories of all time was born - Malcolm Purcell McLean of Maxton, North Carolina.

Maxton, a Robeson county town, is unknown by many, but it's just across the state border from Bennettsville up in Marlboro county. Someone should do a check of the drinking water there, for a lot of folks have made it big in the 20 mile stretch between Bennettsville and Maxton -- Hugh McColl, Rick Hendricks, Marian Wright Edelman of the National Children's Defense Fund, and, last but not least, Malcolm McLean, the father of containerization and the intermodal shipping concept.

Robeson County is about one-third Scots-Irish, one-third Lumbee Indian, and one-third African American. In 1865 when Sherman had burned Columbia and crossed into North Carolina, he recorded that the swamps of Robeson county were the "d___-est place [he'd] ever had to march and fight."

The end of the War Between the States did not bring peace to the county -- bushwhacking and lawlessness known as "Henry Berry Lowrie's War," whites versus the Indians and the freedmen, continued for seven bloody years. At the turn of the century, moonshiners and lumberjacks competed with tobacco farmers for the scarce money in circulation.

Out of this rough region of lower North Carolina, the Great Depression came and went with few hardly noticing. The Klan rode more patrols back then than did the sheriff. The three cultures, Native, African, and Caucasian struggled for an uneasy truce till the automobile and paved roads offered promising new opportunities.

In November 1914 when Malcolm McLean was born, world news hardly made a ripple in the lives of the folks in Robeson County. Far to the north a fellow named Henry Ford was toying with some idea he called an "assembly line for automobiles," not that any of that mattered in Maxton.

The share-cropper's boy left school at sixteen and went to work pumping gas at one of those old-time gas stations that you see only on nostalgia post cards. He worked for three years and saved every penny -- $120. That much money in 1934 equals about $1500 today.

With his brother Jim and sister Clara, these down-home southerners mapped out a scheme on the family's kitchen table. A second-hand pickup truck that Malcolm purchased was the stock of the capitalization. Labor included Malcolm as driver-loader, Jim as loader, and Clara as bookkeeper. Forty years later their idea had morphed into three New York Stock exchange corporations and two others listed on regional exchanges -- all started by this "poor boy from Maxton."

McLean didn't go from overalls and brogans to Hong-Kong tailored suits and Gucci loafers overnight. Robeson County was beginning to pave the roads in some outlying areas and that presented McLean Trucking Company with a chance to haul dirt and gravel. Soon the McLean siblings purchased their second truck and added an additional employee. When road paving jobs eased, they hauled tobacco. Twenty-five-year-old Malcolm figured out the notion of "economy of scale" before the Harvard Business School added the maxim to its curriculum -- he took out a loan and bought a diesel-rig trailer truck.

The story has been repeated so many times that it's difficult to separate legend from fact. Malcolm and his brother made truck runs from Wilmington and Fayetteville up to Hoboken, New Jersey. They would drive much of the way at night on U.S. Highway 17. At the port the McLeans had to queue in a long line of trucks, each waiting for his odd assemblage of freight crates to be off-loaded from a ship and brought to their waiting truck. Delays were aggravating and drivers were eager to get rolling.

Malcolm McLean often told corporate executives that he remembers exactly where he was waiting in a long line of tractor-trailer trucks when the Eureka moment struck. This lanky 23-year-old Tarheel truck-driver puffed on a cigarette as he inched his big rig forward. Somewhere between the inhale and the exhale the idea came to him that he'd stacked toy blocks on a toy truck when he was young and that freight ought to move about the way that a toy truck carries blocks-all neatly stacked.

As it is with all great ideas there was another outfit thinking the same thought. On the West Coast a group named Matson Enterprises was wrestling with the same problem of awkward "break-bulk" cargo and the inefficiency of manpower at the dock. Call it Yankee ingenuity - southern style because Malcolm tinkered with the idea of containers and a system of on and off-loading from ships and rail lines onto trucks. He convinced several banks into backing his grand scheme in April 1956. By that time this truck czar had nearly 2000 big-rigs hauling freight all over the country.

When McLean reached his 45th birthday, he was purchasing steam ships and assisting port designers to figure out better crane operations. In April, 1956, the freighter "Ideal-X," rechristened the "S.S. Maxton," departed Hoboken and steamed past Charleston on its way to Houston. It carried nothing but big-box containers which were on-loaded and off-loaded by cranes in record time. The labor unions were furious.

McLean became the intimate of presidents, prime ministers, and CEO's. He lectured at elite business schools. The country boy "Horatio Alger success story" from Maxton acquired the suave demeanor of the millionaire tycoon. McLean Trucking and Sea-Land Corporation was awarded the government contract for the war in Southeast Asia -- and dozens of other huge contracts.

Malcolm McLean was as revolutionary in the shipping world as Robert Fulton had been a century earlier. Today the shipping container is our life-line to the world. However, Malcolm would quip that, "After all, I'm a Scot -- just like Andrew Carnegie, David Buick, Donald Douglas, Alan Shepard, Buzz Aldrin, John Glenn, and dozens of other pioneers."

(Dr. Thomas B. Horton is a history teacher at Porter-Gaud School. He lives in the Old Village of Mount Pleasant. Visit his Web site at www.historyslostmoments.com)