he built his bus bodies and mounted them on the truck chassis.] During its first four years the Smith Motor Coach Company started two more routes – to Covington and on to Dyersburg, about 75 miles to the north on US-51, and to Jackson, about 82 miles to the east-northeast on US-70 – then extended three routes – the Jackson line to Nashville (the capital of the Volunteer State and in the center of it), the Dyersburg line to Union City, and the Bolivar line to Selmer and soon onward to the east along the southern margin of the state to Chattanooga. Even more growth came quickly, taking the firm outside Tennessee: In 1930 the Smith company reached Paducah in Kentucky, Evansville in Indiana, and Saint Louis in Missouri, and in the next year, 1931, it reached Birmingham in Alabama and Jackson in Mississippi (on the way to New Orleans in Louisiana). As a Greyhound company In 1931 The Greyhound Corporation bought a controlling (majority) interest in the Smith Motor Coach Company, renamed it as the Dixie Greyhound Lines, and appointed Frederick Smith as the president of the DGL (as a subsidiary of the parent Greyhound firm). Later in 1931 Dixie reached as far north as Springfield and Effingham (both in Illinois and on the way to Chicago), thereby completing a Greyhound direct through-route between Chicago and New Orleans via Memphis, by connecting with other Greyhound regional companies to the north (the Illinois GL, later the Central GL, even later the Great Lakes GL) and to the south (the Teche GL). In 1932 Smith (along with J.C. Stedman, an entrepreneur from Houston, Texas) also founded the Toddle House restaurant chain, based too in Memphis. For the next several years the chain expanded through a number of states, opening as many as 50 new stores per year. [Toddle House in 1955 served as the pattern for the creation of the Waffle House chain, partly because one of the founders of the latter had worked as a manager for the former (even while taking part in founding the latter).] In January 1930 Fred Smith drew a brother, Earl William Smith Sr., two years younger than he, into the management of the Dixie GL (and later into Toddle House as well). [Earl had worked (in both passenger service and dining-car operations) for the Frisco (SL&SF) Railway and the Santa Fe (AT&SF) Railroad –