Dixboro Gas Station

When I was in high school, my friend Lisa started dating this guy Tony. I had just started driving, and I was always working on my car, and Tony worked with a guy named Bill Smallwood who was the head mechanic at the GM Proving Grounds. Through Tony and Lisa, I got to know bill pretty well. 

Bill worked at GM during the day, but in the evenings, he would work on cars in his own garage at his house. He would buy cars that had mechanical problems, fix them up, and then sell them. Since he never put the titles in his name and only took cash for the cars, this was a pretty lucrative side business for him. 

I started working with Bill every free moment I got, and there was never a shortage of things to work on. At times his driveway looked like a mini junk yard. He was always bartering with the local junk yards to get parts for one car or another. Often times he would trade a shell of a car for an engine to put in another car. He would do just about anything mechanical on a car except for rebuilding transmissions. He would do some work on a transmission like replacing a clutch, pressure plate, and throw-out bearing, or replacing a torque converter, but rarely would he go any further than that. Other work he would farm out to a transmission shop that he had a relationship with. 

I learned a lot from Bill, and he loved to teach. I used to ask him questions I knew the answer too just so he could have the opportunity to teach me something. Even if I knew the answer, there was usually a new nugget of information in the explanation that I didn't know. Bills garage was heated, so we worked on cars year round, and he had a huge assortment of tools. I really learned a lot from Bill and I got to know a lot of people in Dixboro as a result. 

Dixboro was a small town just outside of Ann Arbor. Through Bill I met Jim who owned the Dixboro gas station. In my senior year in high school, I worked for Jim at the gas station. I pumped gas and was a light duty mechanic. I did mostly oil changes and basic maintenance, but there were times I got to work on an engine too. I remember one time changing a timing chain on a Dodge pickup owned my one of our plowing customers. 

Once I finished high school, I ended up getting a factory job, and spent less and less time in Dixboro. The skills that I learned working with both Bill and Jim have served me well my entire life. I actually don't care about cars at all. I don't look at a car and think it would be cool to have. A car to me is a tool that gets me from one place to another, and if it can carry me and my bike and kayak, then it is a cool car. What I liked about cars in high school was fixing things that were broken. I love taking a problem breaking it down into small pieces and figure out where the failure is. To me working on a car or fixing a server computer are basically the same skills. Fixing things is what gives my life purpose.