It comes that time in old peoples lives when they shouldn’t drive any longer. Since Granny Ruby, my dad’s birth mother, was so independent, she drove longer than she should have.

One day she had a wreck and messed up the front end of her Ford Sedan. She took it down the street from her house to a body shop, hoping to get it fixed before any of us knew anything about it.

Bill’s Body Shop gave her an estimate and went to work on it. When he got ready to repainted it, they couldn’t make the paint match. The car was a faded light blue color. Bill repainted the whole car and didn’t charge a cent more. He noticed that the AC wasn’t working either so he fixed that. It hadn’t worked for years, so it wasn’t caused by the wreck. He didn’t charge her for that either.

When she got the car back it was obvious that some work had been done, because of a beautiful new paint job. She finally came clean on the wreck. When she told me all the things Bill did without charge, I had to go meet Bill. Kenny and I became loyal Bill’s Body Shop client’s for the next 15 years until he retired and quite the business.

All this at a time when Kenny was going through a phase where he almost needed two vehicles, because one would be in the body shop all the time. Some wrecks were minor, while others were more than Bill could help. He even had one pickup in the shop for more than a month once, got it out and the next day day had it delivered back to Bill with more damage than the first time. Bill just shook his head and walked off when the truck was towed in.

We had a fleet of company vehicles on the road all the time, so there was always something of ours there.

All this because Bill treated an old woman nicely.