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| THE SHOP | POP'S RULES | THE CARS | WHAT IT COST | THE LAST DAY | CUSTOMERS REMEMBER |
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My dad, Daniel Childress, fixed cars on Main Street in Tullis Mill, Tennessee, for forty-five years. He
opened Childress Garage in May 1953 and worked there six days a week until he had a stroke at the shop
in April 1998. He passed away that July at 73. We sold the building in December.
I'm Tim Childress, his son. I'm 43, and I teach auto shop at a high school about thirty miles from Tullis Mill. I learned everything I know in that garage, starting with a push broom when I was six. A lot of people in town have asked me to write down what the place was like before everybody forgets. This is my try. Pop would think it was a lot of fuss. He'd read every word.
Pop was born in 1925 on a farm outside Tullis Mill. He was drafted in 1943 and the Army made him a mechanic, which he said was the first time anybody had paid him for something he'd have done for free. He spent the war in a motor pool in France and Germany keeping deuce-and-a-half trucks running, and he came home in 1946 knowing more about engines than anybody in the county. He worked at a Ford dealer in Columbia for seven years and saved every dime. In 1953 he bought the old blacksmith shop on Main Street, across from the feed store, cleaned out sixty years of horseshoes, painted CHILDRESS GARAGE over the door in red, and opened up. He married Mom, Rose, that same fall. She kept the books for forty-five years and says she earned every penny he never paid her.
If you never got to see it, here's what you'd have found, walking in the front door any morning between 1953 and 1998. The office. A wooden counter worn pale in the middle where forty-five years of elbows leaned on it. A brass cash register that rang a bell. A spike for the paid tickets and a cigar box for the ones that weren't paid yet. Mom's ledger. A jar of peppermints for kids. A sign over the counter in Pop's own lettering: IN GOD WE TRUST. ALL OTHERS, I KNOW YOUR DADDY. The bottle cooler. A big red chest cooler full of ice water, with bottles standing in rows: Coca-Cola, RC, orange and grape. You lifted the lid, slid your bottle along the rails and pulled it out at the end. A dime when I was little, a quarter when I was in high school, fifty cents at the end, and Pop always said he lost money on it. There was an opener on the side and a box under it full of caps. Kids in town collected the caps. So did I. The calendar. Every December the parts store gave Pop a new calendar with a different bird dog for every month, and it hung on the nail by the phone. He never once threw the old ones away. When we cleaned out the office there were forty-four of them in a box in the back, 1955 through 1998. That's a lot of bird dogs. The bench grinder. Bolted to the workbench along the back wall, with a stone wheel on the left side and a wire wheel on the right, and a coffee can of water beside it for cooling. He'd sharpen anything you brought him, from a mower blade to a pocketknife, for nothing. The wall behind it was black from forty years of sparks. The tool board. Every wrench had its own place on the pegboard, with the outline painted around it in white, so you could see at a glance what was missing and who had it. Usually me. The bays. Two of them. Bay one got a hydraulic lift in 1961 and Pop acted like he'd been given a new house. Bay two had the old grease pit until 1974, when he finally filled it in. I fell in it once, when I was eight. So did a cat. The stove and the chair. In the corner by the office door was a pot-bellied wood stove, and beside it was a cane-bottomed chair that nobody was ever really sure who owned. From October to April, somebody was always in it: a farmer waiting on a tire, a retired man with nowhere to be, the preacher, once the mayor. Pop called it the liars' chair. More of this town's business got done in that chair than at the courthouse. There was a radio on the shelf above it that played the ball game in the afternoons and the Opry on Saturday nights. The smell. Motor oil, coffee, wood smoke, and the orange hand cleaner. If you grew up in Tullis Mill you know exactly what I mean, and you're smelling it right now. Out front there were two gas pumps until 1989. New federal rules about underground tanks would have cost him more than the pumps had ever made, so he had the tanks dug up and pulled the pumps out, and he said he felt like he'd had two teeth pulled.
For customers (he never wrote these down, but everybody knew them):
For boys who wanted to learn. There were always a few. I was the first. After me came a lot of others over the years, some of them on the next page, and he taught every one of them the same way:
I have rules 2, 3, 4 and 7 painted on the wall of my shop at school. My students think I made them up.
The fifties. Ford flathead V8s and Chevrolet six-cylinders, prewar cars that people kept driving because they couldn't afford new ones, and farm trucks of every kind. When the '55 Chevrolet came out with its new V8, Pop drove to Columbia just to look at one under the hood. He said it was the best engine anybody ever built, and he never changed his mind. The sixties. Falcons, Valiants with the slant six, Chevy IIs, station wagons, and a whole lot of pickups. One Volkswagen Beetle, which for several years was the only foreign car in Tullis Mill. Pop learned to work on it out of a book and complained about it the entire time, and he took better care of it than its owner did. The seventies. Novas, Darts, Pintos and Vegas. The '75 models came with catalytic converters and needed unleaded gas, and Pop had to put in a separate pump for it. He spent the energy crisis teaching people how to keep their old cars tuned up so they'd get better mileage. The eighties. Front-wheel drive and K-cars and the first cars with computers in them. Pop could fix a K-car with his eyes closed. The computers he did not care for. He said a car ought to tell you what's wrong by the way it sounds, not by blinking a light at you, and when one came in that needed a scanner, he sent it to the dealer and told the owner he was sorry. The nineties. By the end, most of what he did was brakes, exhausts, tires, belts and hoses, and keeping the old cars in town alive. Mr. Cogan's '64 Chevy pickup is a good example. Pop kept that truck running for thirty-four years. It's still running. Mr. Cogan says he's afraid to let anybody else touch it.
Mom kept every ticket book. I went through the boxes and pulled a brake job from each of three years, just to show what things cost. Pop always charged less than the dealers in Columbia, and he knew it, and he didn't care.
The 1955 ticket has a note on it in Mom's handwriting: paid in eggs, 2 doz, balance cash. That happened more often than you'd think.
Pop had his stroke on a Tuesday morning in April 1998, with his head under the hood of a Buick. Mr. Betz was in the liars' chair and called the ambulance. Pop lived another three months. He couldn't talk much after, but he could squeeze your hand, and every time I visited he'd squeeze mine and look at the door, and I knew he was asking if I was keeping the shop swept. I was. He died at home in July, with Mom there. Nobody in the family could take the shop on. My sisters, Sally and Pam, have their own lives, and mine's at school, and to be honest none of us could have done it the way he did. In the fall we sold off what we couldn't keep. The lift went to a young man starting his own shop over in the next county. The bench grinder and the tool board came to my classroom. I have the brass cash register in my den. The bird dog calendars, all forty-four, are at Mom's. On a Saturday in December 1998 I went over by myself for the last time. The building was empty and swept, and I'd swept it. I turned off the lights in the office, walked out into bay one, and pulled the big door down. It squealed the same as it always had, the same squeal I'd heard every evening of my childhood at six o'clock, which was how we knew at home that Pop was on his way to supper. I put the padlock on and gave the key to the lawyer on Monday. A couple from Nashville bought the building. They're going to sell antiques in it. They seem like nice people. They asked if they could keep the CHILDRESS GARAGE over the door, and Mom said yes, and then she went out to the car and cried, and then she came back in and signed the papers. If you knew Pop, or if he ever worked on your car, I hope you'll read what other people remember, and write and tell me yours. |
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