(Being that this is Father’s Day I wanted to remember my late grandfather with one of the more fun reminders of how awesome he was with this blog site that originally ran back in 2014. I LOVE this!) Lots of times when I am writing something it’ll trigger memories of when I was a kid or like in some sort of weird YouTube “suggested videos” thing my mind will leap back to a blog I wrote years ago and that’s the case today. I published this letter after my grandfather’s passing in 2012. We found it in his house among his papers and it documents a rather prickly relationship with a local Chevrolet dealer that wasn’t holding up their end of the bargain servicing his trucks. It is a fun window back in time and something that my frontal…or left…or right (if I even have one) lobe fired off and caused me to remember. Here’s a little more background:
During the 1950s and early 1960s my grandfather owned a construction company that did all different kinds of projects. As part of his operation he had a few trucks, one of which was a Chevy. The letter below is about that truck. More specifically it is about how shoddy the dealership service department has been in taking care of said truck. This letter cracks me up because he takes the dealership up one side and right down the other without ever getting nasty or profane about it.
I wonder what ever became of that service manager?
(To zoom in on the letter, hold the Ctrl key and the press + sign key)
This is an interesting letter. In my old days as a chauffeur, the vast majority of our fleet consisted of Lincoln Towncars and Chevy Suburbans, with a few Escalades tossed in. In that industry, the cars run 7 days a week, racking up 60,000 a year. That translates an oil change a month and brake jobs every 6 months.
We took our Towncars to the local Ford dealer, who took them right in and usually had the driver out of there in less than hour, to get him and the vehicle back to work in a timely fashion. The Chevy dealer we bought the SUVs from, however, wanted to keep the truck for the entire day with an appointment a week in advance. When they wouldn’t accommodate the necessity of the business we worked, the Ford dealer service manager stepped up and took care of our Chevy’s as well. They began stocking what was needed to get our basic servicing done. The Chevy service manager was stunned we took our Chevy fleet to a Ford dealer. But, they had their chance and lost out because they didn’t understand what the word “service” meant.
I see Grandpa was also a wordsmith. The apples don’t fall far from the Lohnes family tree.