I was looking for an old photo and discovered these in the archives. It's a photo history of the family business. Not a lot of photos, because back then you used a camera. Some of these are Polaroids, so the quality is variable.
I believe this was the original gas station. It was located on Watertown Avenue in Waterbury Connecticut. The flood of 1955 pretty much took care of the building. The location is now either the roadway or an exit ramp off of Connecticut Route 8 south.
Probably the Waterbury Armory Car Show. The local dealers used to show the latest and greatest at the Armory down town. My dad is in his element, next to a scantily clad younger woman. Probably around 1956 to 1959, based on the SAAB grille and the natty bow tie Francis is wearing. The front license plate is XM 159. Our dealer number was 159. I had XC 159 from 1973 until 2013. I still have it as a vanity plate.
1963 or 1964. A new Studebaker Lark, an Avanti parked next to our new tow truck, a Studebaker Champ pickup. This truck made it into the early 1970's when it finally died of rust. It was replaced by a Ford Wrecker that was brilliantly ordered without power steering, and the hardest thing to drive a low speeds. Oops! We were SAAB Studebaker and Volvo at the time, but the truck doesn't list Volvo.
Another Armory Car Show photo. 1964 or 65. This time he cornered two of the models.
Our 1967 SAAB pickup. Svenska Aeroplan Aktiebolaget used to ship their new cars into the port of New Haven, Connecticut. This was pretty convenient, for us. In 1967, a boatload of new cars ran into a storm coming to the US. One of them broke loose in the hold, and proceeded to beat itself and a bunch of other cars half to death. The imported sold the cars to people like my Dad to try to recover the loss. I was told we bought 7 of them, 6 sedans and one wagon. The sedans had the roofs removed and were converted to convertibles, the wagon had the roof shortened, and the tailgate modified into a pickup. I remember seeing one of the convertibles headed for the scrapyard when I started working in 1970. They were dangerous as hell, since no reinforcing was added after the roof was removed. It got to the point where you couldn't open and close both doors at the same time, due to body flex. Ah, the good old days, before safety laws and lawyers that advertised on TV.
Another satisfied customer. I have no idea who this is, mid 1960's
Our house, our camping trailer, and a SAAB. What the lot next door to our house looked like in the 60's. The man who invented the soft magnets on that held the sign onto the car was an eccentric genius who was always broke because he forgot to patent or market anything he created. My Dad always drove SAABs until we gave up the franchise. It broke his heart to give it up, he was the first dealer in the country, but it was the correct choice. We replaced it with Subaru, and ended up selling more Subarus in a year, than SAABS in 4 years.
The second picture looks like it was taken in my Aunt Jerrie's driveway.
The boss in his office. It was tough being the child of a local legend. He knew everybody and everything, and loved the ladies. He had the attention span of a gnat, everything had to be his way, and despised changes like multi-line phones and faxes. I don't think he even liked cars, he just liked to sell. More than once people told me he could sell ice to Eskimos and sand to the Arabs. I saw it far too many times, people would walk out of the showroom, a dazed expression on their faces, a thinner wallet, and a grinning Irishman behind them.
The rock. The dealership was built into a granite monolith. The building was supposed to be one floor, but they ran out of money and dynamite, so it was built into a hill. This rock was a remnant of the original lump. It was 60 feet wide, 20 feet high, and over 150 feet long. It was only about 10 feet way from the back of the building, so there was a narrow alley you had to drive thru to get from one side to the other, or you could take a rutted dirt road around the rock, thru the junk yard. There was a path in the back to get up on top of the rock, and we would park cars up there.
This is what the rock looked like after we started construction on the service department addition. We had to move 207,000 cubic feet of granite. This is after you used hundreds of pounds of dynamite on it and ran a rock crushing plant for over 90 days. I never wonder where my hearing loss came from. We fractured the spring that we used for water. We had to pump the hole out for months, and deal with the loss of water pressure. We finally had to tap into the town water line in front of the building.
The second photo shows why a parking brake can be your friend. A technician was working on his own vehicle. He needed to get a tool, slammed the hood shut on his running car and realized it was a) still in drive b) being held in position only by the angle of the slope c) didn't have the brake on. The tow truck operator didn't charge him for the call because he was too busy laughing to make out a bill.
The showroom pre-construction and addition. The entire sales staff is in the photo, we won an award for selling a record 10 new Subarus in one month. Progress!
Blasting Bob from Tri-State Explosives. Leave it to Francis to find a discount blaster. The reason he was so inexpensive was because he was able to lower his overhead by cutting out expensive items like equipment and insurance. We didn't know about the insurance at the time. I joked that it was Tri-State explosives because when Bob was done, our building was in Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts.
Picture 1, on the left shows a 10 foot tall , 40 foot long wall adjacent to the original building. That wall was supposed to be the back of the new showroom addition. Picture 2, in the middle shows the shower of dirt rising when Blasting Bob used a little too much dynamite to clear out behind the wall. He also found a staircase that was built into the outer wall of the building, but had been covered over in the late 60's. The staircase looked like a good place to put a few charges. The 3rd photo shows the wall we wanted to keep laying on the ground in one piece. The construction was now starting to get really interesting.
Digging out after the blast. It's a good thing we evacuated the building for the first time in the project. The shock wave from the dynamite Good Old Bob had placed on the outside staircase did some really entertaining things. The sales manager's office was ripped apart by flying glass, he would have been killed if he stayed there. We had a practical demonstration on why they call it a "drop" ceiling, since the entire ceiling in the showroom dropped onto the new cars. We had some bracing to do, and it was the last time we saw Blasting Bob. Ever. Seriously. If you see him, let me know, he still owes damages.
Felix and Debbie repairing the showroom. The Mutt and Jeff of the contracting world, Felix was about 4' 11" and Debbie was close to 6 feet. They fought constantly, and I swear more than once, Felix was actively trying to kill Debbie. Debbie wasn't his real name, his last name was DeBlassio, so he became Debbie. I would have to go and referee fights between them.
Thanks for taking a ride down memory lane with me. 53 years associated with a business, 43 years actively working there gives you some amazing memories, and some unbelievable stories. Some days it was like working in a live action comic strip. There are still more photos floating around the house, I'll have to get moving and start posting them.