In 1979, while still working for his previous employer, Duane Eaton joined 2,700 others and attended his first Produce Marketing Association convention, which was held in Phoenix. There were 224 booths.

“In those days the PMA trade show was about the size of the regional shows today,” he said.

Duane Eaton’s official PMA photo from early 1980s.As a point of reference, Eaton’s final show as a member of the PMA staff was the New Orleans Fresh Summit this past October that featured 2,400 booths and 18,000 attendees. He retired from the association on Jan. 31, 2014, shortly after his milestone 65th birthday.

Obviously, a lot has changed in the 34 years between those two shows.

Eaton grew up in Maryland just north of Baltimore in a town called Towson. His father had a stroke when he was 10 and died a couple of years later, which caused Eaton and his two older sisters to be raised mostly by a single mom. But other than that, he said he lived a fairly normal childhood with the typical ups and downs.

After college, he didn’t travel far as he ended up graduating from his hometown school, Towson State College, which has since become Towson University.

When Eaton was a kid it was known as the State Teachers College of Towson, which may be the reason he entered the college seeking a teacher’s degree.

“From very early on I knew I wanted to be a teacher,” he said. “In fact, I started out as a math major and assumed I would become a math teacher. However, calculus 3 ended that dream and I switched to social studies.”

But he stayed on the teacher path and received his credential in 1971. His first and last regular teaching job was as a long-term substitute in an inner city Baltimore junior high school.

Duane Eaton (right) with convention chairman Jeff Gargiulo planning the 1983 PMA Fresh Summit Convention in New Orleans.“It was a terrible experience,” he said. “On my first day, my bulletin board was set on fire. While I was there my tires were slashed twice. Teachers were not allowed to walk the halls alone. You had to go in pairs. Though it was only a junior high, there were kids there that were 17 and 18 years old.”

Luckily, Eaton kept the fast food job at a local joint that had gotten him through college. It was there that he met the director for the local builders and contractors association and he soon began his career doing association work.

“They hired me to run their apprenticeship program,” he said. “I was only 23 years old and I am not sure I knew what I was doing, but I was running a pretty good-sized program.”

There were 1,200 students in the program and it was Eaton’s job to pick the apprentices, hire the teachers and oversee the effort, which included all the basic construction needs such as plumbing, electrical and framing programs. He did the job well enough that only a year-and-a-half into it, the national organization — Associated Builders & Contractors Inc. in Washington, DC — came knocking at his door.

“They wanted me to set up a national apprenticeship program,” said Eaton. “I told them I didn’t really want to leave the local organization but he said he would double my salary and I said, ‘Where do I sign?’“

Eaton rose through the ranks of the educational sector of the organization and stayed with that association from 1973 to the fall of 1979.

Duane Eaton saying farewell at the PMA Leadership Dinner in New Orleans in October 2013.“At that time, I was going through a divorce and I wanted a change of pace,” he said. “I saw an ad for an education manager at this trade association in Newark, Delaware, and I thought that was a great opportunity to get out of Washington, DC, for a year or two.”

He was hired by Produce Marketing Association President Bob Carey and Jim Johnson, who was in charge of the association’s educational efforts. Eaton gave two weeks notice to the builder’s association but took a few days off in the meantime to work the Phoenix convention as part of the PMA staff, which at the time had only 11 other employees and needed all the help they could get.

While his title was education manager, Eaton said the size of the PMA staff required everyone to be a jack-of-all-trades.

Commenting on Eaton’s career at PMA, current Chief Executive Officer Bryan Silbermann said, “Duane’s career at PMA has spanned five decades — from the 1970s to the 2010s — and he’s been instrumental in growing member value as well as growing PMA’s unique culture. You can see his legacy in many things we do today. He began his career developing PMA’s early education programs, some of which grew into PMA’s Foundation for Industry Talent. His talent at growing our annual convention laid the groundwork for the global networking phenomenon that is now Fresh Summit. He was the one who first grappled with standardized codes for produce before turning that task over to me in the 1980s. Later in his career, he took a more inward focus, leading our administrative team. Through it all, he’s been the champion of mixing work with enjoyment and caring, a delight each year as the ‘Demented Santa’ at our staff holiday party, a mentor to many, and always the curator of PMA’s culture. We’re going to miss him tremendously, but we’re also very grateful that his daughter, Mandy, is now on the PMA team, bringing her dad’s same passion for excellence to bear in all she does.”

In Eaton’s early years, PMA had just instituted the three division setup that included the retail, floral and foodservice divisions. Eaton served as staff liaison to the retail division and said one of his first tasks “was working with United (United Fresh Fruit & Vegetable Association, at the time) on UPC and PLU codes.”

He also spent a lot of time in the nation’s capital working on Project MUM, the industry’s effort to standardize its use of cartons.

For the industry, Eaton has long been the face of the trade show. In those early years, the aforementioned Johnson was in charge of the convention while Eaton was in charge of the trade show. On average, he said the trade show work took about half of his time.

Over the years, PMA expanded its staff and Eaton’s title and duties were also expanded. At some point, the size of the show and the size of PMA required him to take more of an administrative role, which he has been doing for many years. He retired as senior vice president of administration, with direct responsibility for the departments of human resources, information technology, facilities and, of course, convention services.

He has seen tremendous change in the industry since his beginning, which has manifested itself most clearly in the growth of PMA’s Fresh Summit.

“In those early years, the trade show was all produce and floral, with floral accounting for about 20 percent of the space,” he said. “Almost everyone had 10-foot booths. I think it was 1981 that we sold our first island booth.”

After growing Fresh Summit beyond compare over the years, Eaton is seeing a little bit of a return to earlier days, where the size and beauty of the booth takes a backseat to its business functionality for many exhibitors.

“We are seeing a bit of the European influence where companies are setting up business centers within their booth,” he said. “It’s not just about looking at the pretty produce. Many of these booths are built for business.”

But Eaton said Fresh Summit still remains as vibrant and as vital as ever. It has done so, no doubt in large part to his watchful eye. “Every year we look at it to make sure it remains relevant.”

In fact, Eaton recently was looking at an internal document he wrote 20 years ago looking at the future of the trade show and analyzing some of the challenges and concerns, including the growing technology sector and how that would play a role in future trade shows.

He said the changes are evident as one walks around Fresh Summit and looks at the booths and the exhibitors. Produce- and floral-centric booths are still key, but technology, services and equipment play a major role as well. And foreign exhibitor space has risen dramatically in recent years.

“You only have to look at the Mexican pavilion to see that,” he quipped.

He said there have been other changes as well. In 1979, about 30 percent of the registrants were classified as “ladies” and most attended the thee days of tours on the “spouses program.” That program was eliminated years ago and the many women who attend today are part of the industry and no different than any other attendee.

Though regional shows have flourished in the past four or five years, PMA’s Fresh Summit remains vital and vibrant, year after year.

“I can’t say there hasn’t been any cannibalization,” Eaton said. “Companies only have so much money and time to spread out, and certainly there are companies that believe a regional presence makes more sense for them. And if that strategy works for them, that’s great.”

The PMA Fresh Summit, he said, does have more of a global experience, and seemingly continues to offers great value for a large sector of the industry. He added that about 20 percent of the attendees in 2013 were from outside of the United States.

The continuing growth of the show does limit the list of hosting cities. Eaton said the PMA board has made it very clear that they want the trade show to be held in one contiguous space, and not too many convention centers can accommodate 2,400 booths.

In fact, he said the next trip to Atlanta may be the last. “We just signed Dallas for 2020,” he said.

Anaheim, Orlando and New Orleans are still in play, as are Las Vegas and Chicago, though the latter two present other challenges in regards to timing that are difficult to surmount.

In any event, Eaton expects the convention and trade show to remain relevant for years to come, even as other industries and associations have seen their trade shows decline over the years.

“We cover the entire supply chain and virtually everyone comes to the convention,” said Eaton.

He said with proper marketing and enough pre-planning, you can see almost everyone you need to see in a very truncated time span.

Eaton said he will miss the people most in his retirement. “When I was in the construction industry, I worked with a lot of good people and I enjoyed that time very much. But there is nothing like the people in the produce industry. All the people I have worked with, the chairmen, the board members, all the people in the industry … I’ll miss that.”

And make no mistake, Eaton is retiring.

Eaton will be joined in retirement by his wife, Toni, who worked as a production manager for the Produce for Better Health Foundation. The two plan to travel and enjoy the good life, Eaton said.

“We like to travel,” he said. “For our 30th anniversary last year we took a river cruise in Europe. Our first trip (as retirees) will be a six-week cross-country trip, where we are going to try to see as many of our national parks as we can.”

Despite his retirement, the Eaton name will still be popping up on the PMA payroll. As mentioned earlier, his daughter Mandy, who worked for the organization off-and-on as a college student, took a full-time job about 18 months ago and is now an event manager, working with the annual PMA Foodservice Conference in Monterey, CA.  

Because the extended family, including their other daughter, Katie, who is a research analyst, live in the northern Delaware region, the Eatons have no plans to move from the area they have called home for more than 30 years.

“We wrote down all the things we would like in our dream house, and discovered we live in it already,” he said.

There is something to be said for staying put, as Duane Eaton has proven over the past 30-plus years.