We celebrated Jerry Pauley’s retirement . . . twice! We had a wonderful turnout on Tuesday, July 28th, with Jerry’s family friends and plenty of employees ready to tell stories about Jerry. With WOWK on hand they also did a wonderful story on 53 years in the automotive business. Then on August 8th, we again celebrated with the community with hotdogs, hamburgers and again, stories of how Jerry took care of his customers.Just a couple of stories that were told:

Jerry had been hired in the Service department just for the summer to cover peoples vacations. At that time Dusty Rhodes was one of the owners and he went to him and said he had done a good job and when they needed someone full time he would hire him then. Jerry said, “Dusty was pretty forgetful and I was young and needed to work someplace, and I figured it might as well be Rhodes-Walker. When the following Monday rolled around, I came back to work just like I was supposed to,” When he would see Mr. Rhodes, he would hide so he wouldn’t see him. This went on for about a week until Rhodes spotted him. “I guess he thought the service manager had hired me and the service manager thought that Mr. Rhodes had hired me.” So he just kept working.

Jerry remembers the first car he ever sold was a Chevy Monte Carlo to Ivan and Carl “Bill” Lee. Both Ivan and Bill and their families have continued to buy from him throughout all of those years, he continued to see even to their children.

He also told of a time that one of his customers bought a car for his wife for a surprise Christmas gift. He asked Jerry to bring the car to his home on Christmas Eve and put it in his garage with a big red bow on top. “On Christmas morning I got a call at home asking me where the car was,” he recalled. “I made the trip back to his home only to discover I had mistakenly put the car in the next-door neighbor’s garage. “Needless to say, it took me a while to explain to the neighbor’s wife what had happened as she thought her husband had bought her a new car for Christmas,” Jerry said.

He told of the time in 1978, Charleston had a huge snow and the dealership closed down. For Pauley, working was a way of life, and it was hard for him to just sit around and do nothing. He brought home a four-wheel-drive truck form work and was able to get around in the snow. “After hearing I was mobile, we stared getting calls form nurses who needed to get to work at Thomas Hospital and people who didn’t have groceries. Our children, Scarlett and Scott, and their friends took orders and Jackie, my wife, and I went to the grocery store buying many loaves of bread and gallons for milk and we delivered them to our neighbors,” Jerry said. He said he was just helping the community.

When Jerry was in good health, it was nothing for him to have a 25 car month. With Jerry Pauley, you knew what you were getting, honesty, integrity, strait to the point, and you didn’t need to question him.

Staring in Service part time to working in sales from 9 am to 3 pm in Used cars and then walking across the street to work a second shift in New cars, Jerry ended up with enough repeat business that it would do him for a while.

So the time has come for Jerry to retire and you all know him…. He is not one to sit back and let things just happen so….. he will still get phone calls from previous customers and I am sure that he will still work trades!

Jerry will be missed.

Congratulations to Jerry Pauley on a wonderful career at Joe Holland.