FedEx founder Fred Smith, a Marine Corps veteran who revolutionized package delivery, dies at 80, company says

Memphis, Teen – The company said that Farid Smith, founder of Fedex Corp. That revolutionized the rapid delivery industry, died. It was 80.

Fedex started working in 1973, as it provided parcels and small documents more quickly than the postal service. Over the course of the next half century, Ashraf Smith, a veterans of the Marine Corps, the growth of a company has become an economic thing because many other companies rely on it.

Memphis, FEDEX, based in Tennessee, has become a 17 million logistical transportation company for every working day. Smith resigned as an executive head in 2022, but he remained an executive president.

Smith, a graduate of Yale University in 1966, used a business theory in the college to create a connection system based on coordinated flights focusing on a main center and a “axis and speaking” system, as it became known.

The company also played a major role in the transformation by American business and industry to a greater use of time -sensitive delivery and less dependence on inventories and large warehouses.

Smith once told the Associated Press that he had reached the name Feder EXPress because he wanted the company to look great and important when it was actually emerging with a future out of confirmation.

At that time, Smith was trying to obtain a large shipping contract with the Fed Reserve Bank that did not succeed.

Initially, the Federal Express had 14 small aircraft operating outside the Memphis International Airport packages to 25 American cities.

Smith’s father, also called Friedrich, built a small fortune in Memphis with a regional bus line and other commercial projects. After the college, Smith joined the US Marine Corps and another lieutenant was assigned. He left the army as a leader in 1969 after two rounds in Vietnam, where he was decorated for the courage and wounds he had received in the fighting.

He told Associated Press in an interview in 2023 that everything he did to run Fedex came from his experience in Marines, and not what he learned in Yale.

Getting the Fadyral Express was not an easy task. The shipments were overnight on the American business, and the company had to have a fleet of aircraft and a system of ways to connect the inter -air in place.

Former President George W. Bush issued a statement praising Smith that he was “one of the best Americans in our generation” and Fedex as “an innovative company that helped ship our economy.”

Smith was the owner of the minority of the NFL team in Washington until 2021, when the owner Daniel Snyder and his family bought the stocks kept by Smith, Dwayet Shar and Bob Rochd. His son Arthur was a major coach in Atlanta Falcons for three seasons and is currently the coordinator of the attack in Pittsburgh Sters.

Although one of the most famous and most popular citizens of Mevis, Smith generally avoided the general lights and devoted his energies to work and the family.

Despite its low decline, Smith appeared in the movie “Castaway” for the year 2000, starring Tom Hanks. The film was about the Fedex employee who was cut off on an island.

“Memphis has lost its most important citizen,” said American MP Steve Cohen of Tennessee. “Fedex is the engine of our economy, and Farid Smith was the founder of insight. But more, he was a dedicated citizen who was deeply interested in our city.”

Smith rarely published the donations he and his family made, but he agreed to speak with AP in 2023 about a gift to the Marine Marine Scholarship Corporation to unify a new scholarship box for children of marine service members who follow studies at STEM.

Smith said at that time: “The thing that cares about me is the institutions and reasons that do not name or recognize.”

He responded to what it means to contribute to the public good, he answered:

“America is the most generous country in the world. It is a surprising thing that the Americans make every year. Everything is from the smallest things to these huge health care initiatives and the Gates Foundation and everything between them,” he said. “I think that if you do a good job in this country, it is better to be at least to be ready to give a very good part of that to the public interest. All of this is the great tradition of American charitable works.”