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West Lawn has lost a familiar face to generations of customers who bought beer and cases of soda from his family-operated beverage distribution business after a fatal motor vehicle accident near his home last week.
Thomas A. Derr, 94, was airlifted to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center in Philadelphia following the Sept. 16 crash about 4 p.m. at Mohns Hill and Chapel Hill roads in Spring Township. He suffered catastrophic injuries and died two days later, on Sept. 18, the family said.
Police said Derr’s pickup truck collided with a sedan and then struck a tree. The other driver wasn’t seriously injured. Further details were unavailable.
Derr was heading home from the family business, West Lawn Beverage, 2330 Penn Ave., to have dinner with his wife, Dolores, as he did daily around that time, his family said.
Business pioneer
Derr started the business with his parents, Leroy and Elizabeth, in 1951. Both of his parents worked in knitting mills but were frequently out of work because the mills were closing down.
Derr told the Reading Eagle in 2014 that his father came home one day, tired of being laid off, and was determined to get a license from the state to open a beer distributor business. The first location was in a cement block building with no windows. It was next to the current location.
For decades, a warm greeting from Tom Derr upon entering was as reliable to customers as the aroma of roasting peanuts.
Derr was something of a West Lawn institution. Born and raised in a home on Telford Avenue, he graduated from Wilson High School in 1948.
He served as director of the Malt Beverage Distributors Association for more than three decades and successfully advocated for legislation that allowed distributors to sell 6- and 12-packs in addition to cases and kegs of beer.
Derr was pioneer in commercial recycling. In the early 1980s, laws to encourage recycling were being proposed. The beverage industry had switched from steel to aluminum cans, and there wasn’t much use for the new containers, which often ended up along roads, in farmers’ fields or in landfills.
Derr launched a buy-back aluminum recycling center in 1984 under the same roof as the beverage store. Customers, Scouting groups and others hauled in large bags full of cans that were dumped into a barrel for weighing. A conveyor belt transported them to the main hopper of a machine that compressed them into 18-pound cubes.
In 2014, Derr noted the company had reached a milestone of 12 million pounds of aluminum cans recycled.
The aluminum recycling effort spawned a separate business, Berks Container Recovery, a Spring Township recycling center for non-ferrous metals.
Derr was influential in Berks County’s early recycling efforts in the 1980s, serving on its solid waste advisory group and helping to launch curbside recycling programs and drop-off centers in various communities.
Besides his wife, Dolores, Derr is survived by their four sons: Michael, David, Richard and John. The couple raised their children initially in a home in West Wyomissing before the family moved to a farm in Spring Township. The eldest sons — Michael, David and Richard — work in the family business.
‘He wanted to keep going’
David Derr, who runs Berks Container Recycling with his daughter, Alexa Derr, said his father, right to his last day, did the things that brought him joy.
Besides being at the distributor, his activities included tending to the pigs he raised on his farm and picking up something for dinner at home with his wife. He had the sandwiches in his truck at the time of the accident.
“Over the years, I’ve always felt that maybe he should kick back a bit, but he wanted no part of that,” David said. “He wanted to keep going and watch his businesses flourish.”
Warm remembrances have poured into the West Lawn Beverage Facebook page since news of his passing was posted there.
“It confirmed what we knew in our hearts,” David said. “That the people he touched over the last 74 years in the family business — that he was the face of — span generations.”