I spent most of the 35 years before Motor Age with a wrench in my hand. My first job was as a service station attendant while I was still in high school at the age of 15. Yep, I was the “man with the star – the big, bright Texaco star!” I’m betting very few of you remember those days but back then, it was the local service station/garage that took care of the family car, and it was there I began to learn my trade.
My next major shift was a few years later, after I had graduated high school. I was attending Virginia Commonwealth University and being a city campus, parking was often a challenge. So, I bought a motorcycle to ride to school and it didn’t take long for this means of transportation to capture my enthusiasm. I traveled south from my home in Virginia to Daytona Beach, Florida to attend the American Motorcycle Institute, a private trade school that specialized in teaching motorcycle mechanics.
I returned home, worked as a motorcycle mechanic, and spent the next few years working for local Honda and Kawasaki dealerships. The opportunity to move to Florida and work at a Honda dealer just north of Orlando came up and I wasted no time making the move to the Sunshine State.
Wanting to grow in my chosen field, I took a job teaching at the Motorcycle Mechanics Institute in Orlando, where I earned teaching credentials and certification from the National Association of Trade and Technical Schools. I fell in love with teaching and took a great deal of pleasure in seeing the lights come on when a student was having a tough time grasping a lesson or solving a hands-on challenge.
But unfortunately, it was hard to support a family on a private trade school instructor’s pay. After trying a few career paths more in the white collar world, I realized that my most marketable ability came in being able to fix things that, in many instances, others couldn’t fix, and I made the move back to cars/light trucks at the dawn of OBD II (mid-1990s) and have been there, for the most part, ever since.