Just ask H.K. Wallace, of Lazy Days R.V. Center Inc. (#375). Years ago, he paid $2,000 for a trailer so he could take the family for a vacation in North Carolina. When he arrived back home, he parked it out beside his house in Tampa, and damned if somebody didn't drive by and offer him $4,000 for the rig. Now with $43 million a year in sales, he and his family claim to run the largest single-location RV dealership in the country.

El Paso's Tracks to Adventure picks up from there. Taking a page from the wagon-train sagas, Maria and Larry Olsen organize groups of up to 20 RVs on excursions to Alaska, Canada, Mexico, even New Zealand. "Wagonmasters" lead the tours, "wheelwrights" are there all along the way to take care of any repairs, and "frontiersmen" scout out the campsites and attractions -- and the natives.

#417 ETERNA-LINE CORP. BOISE, IDAHO

Did you ever wonder who paints the lines on highways? Meet Steve Neighbors, who has put stripes on so many roads that he's now earned a place on the INC. 500.

To hear it from Neighbors, the life of the highway striper is not without its trials. It's not uncommon for passing motorists to smudge your work or to try to force you from your appointed path or even to spit upon your person.And while television monitors now help chart the course of most striping machines, the results are not always perfect: on more than one occasion, Neighbors's workers have painted themselves into the soft shoulder (yes, there is a highway-stripe paint remover).

Neighbors sends his Eterna-Line machinery and crew chiefs around the country, painting stripes, grinding down bumps, and raising up sunken sections of highways. Local hires are often used to fill out the crews -- with mixed results. "When we go South, it means we have to hire two or three people to do the job that could be done by one person from the North," Neighbors reports. "The only state we don't like to work in so much is California. The people there are self-oriented. We like to develop a team effort, but it's tough to do that in California."

#461 AMERICAN LIST COUNSEL INC. PRINCETON, NJ.

Our nominee for the most genteel INC. 500 business is an old friend, the American List Counsel, whose offices are located in an historic 18th-century farmhouse in one of the most pleasant university towns in the United States. But don't be fooled. This aggressive $16-million mailing-list broker is riding the wave of a retailing revolution that finds one out of every two U.S. consumers shopping from home by way of catalogs, 800-numbers, credit cards, and computers. The competition for home shoppers, in fact, is so intense that the price of quality lists has reached as high as 20? per name.

Even before there was an American List Counsel, Liza Price was the list broker for INC.'s publisher. Now in her own business with husband Donn Rappaport, Price's clients include retailers Neiman-Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman, fruit sellers Harry and David, and magazines ranging from Ms. to U.S. News & World Report. It is the company's third year on the INC. 500.

#488 T H HILL ASSOCIATES INC. HOUSTON

Last year, he was #221. This year, it's #488. And if things keep going the way they've been going, Tom Hill figures it will be a miracle if he qualifies at all in 1987.

Hill is in the oil-field consulting business, and right now, there isn't much oil drilling going on. Not as long as OPEC is selling its oil for less than it costs U.S. companies to take it out of the ground. And certainly not the high-risk, high cost offshore and critical-environment drilling for which T H Hill Associates offers its specialized consulting services. "We're thinking of diversifying some," Hill says.

HOW THE INC. 500 WERE SELECTED

For special-projects editor Sara Baer-Sinnott, the INC. 500 is a year-round assignment. Even as one year's list is off to the printer, she is contacting chambers of commerce, accounting firms, venture capitalists, consultants, and trade associations looking for nominations for the next year's tabulation. Requests for nominations also appear in advertisements in INC. and PR Journal.

To qualify for the 1986 list, a company must be independent and privately held. The rankings are based on the percentage increase in sales during a five-year period. During the base year (1981), sales must have been between $100,000 and $25 million. And during the fifth year (1985), sales must have been greater than the year before. Rapidly growing companies that were very small in 1981 thus are not eligible for the INC. 500. Neither are companies that go public before the end of their fifth year.

This year, INC. received more qualification forms than ever before. These were verified by phone with company officials and their accountants. The verification is a painstaking task that falls mainly to our summer interns, and while it is not the most intellectually stimulating job, it is also not without its lighter moments and long-term compensations. We remember Chauncy Lennon's question to the chief executive officer of Star Nail Products Inc. about the impact of the housing boom on his sales: it was only then that Chauncy discovered that Star Nail makes acrylic fingernails, not construction spikes. Paul Zurlo, as the junior member of the 500 research team, won the task of putting the thousands of applications in alphabetical order in boxes -- which he later dropped on the floor. We remember Jeannie Quinn as the only intern who, against strong peer pressure, resisted the challenge of the daily crossword puzzle. And Anne Davidson thought her call to History Associates Inc. interesting enough to follow up with a successful job application.

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