I Wonder Where They Are?

Every now and then, a name pops into my head that I haven't thought about in 30 years, and there's usually no particular reason for it. I may be driving somewhere, sitting at my desk, watching television or trying to fall asleep, and suddenly I'll remember a salesperson who worked for me in 1992, somebody from the service department, an office employee, a customer I sold a car to decades ago, or someone who sat three offices down from mine for years. Sometimes I can still see the person's face perfectly, hear the voice and remember things we laughed about that I haven't thought about since they happened.

And inevitably I wonder where they are now.

I spent a huge part of my life in car dealerships, and if you've never worked in one, it is difficult to explain how close people can become. You don't just work together. You spend an enormous amount of your life together through Saturdays, late nights, month-ends, holidays, good months, terrible months, new-model introductions, hailstorms, computer systems going down at exactly the wrong time and those wonderful days when everything seemed to click and you couldn't deliver the cars fast enough. You ate together, argued with each other, celebrated together and occasionally got mad enough at somebody that you were certain you'd never speak to them again, and then Monday came and you went right back to work together.

Over the years, hundreds and hundreds of people worked for me. Some stayed a short time, others stayed for years, and a few became lifelong friends. There were salespeople who could sell anything with four wheels and an engine, technicians who could diagnose a problem by listening to an engine for 30 seconds, office people who knew where every piece of paper in the dealership was located, receptionists who knew customers by the sound of their voices, porters who worked in brutal Texas heat and service advisers who could calm an angry customer better than most general managers ever could.

Then there were people like Dick, the kind of person who becomes part of the fabric of a dealership. After enough years, people like that know the customers, the employees, the history and probably where a few bodies are buried. They don't have to demand respect because they've earned it by showing up year after year, doing their jobs and helping the people around them. When I think back on my dealership years, it's people like Dick I remember much more clearly than whatever our sales total happened to be in a particular month.

And then there was Joe MeHarg.

Joe goes much further back in my life. When I was a teenager working around a Ford dealership, Joe was one of the top salespeople there, but to me he became much more than that. He was a friend and a mentor at an age when I didn't yet know I was beginning a career that would consume most of my adult life. I watched people like Joe and learned things about selling cars and dealing with people that no training manual could have taught me.

Years later, Joe and I picked out a silver Ford LTD with a light-gray interior for him. Joe looked at that combination and joked that the thing looked like a casket. It was exactly the kind of remark you remember because it was funny at the time, and neither of us could possibly have known how cruelly memorable those words would eventually become.

Joe was only 39 when he was killed in a head-on collision while driving that LTD to Wichita Falls.

So I know where Joe went.

But all these years later, he still occasionally shows up in my thoughts. I can remember the dealership, remember being that teenager watching him work, and remember a man who probably had no idea how much influence he was having on a kid who was paying attention. Joe never got to see where my career went, the dealerships I would eventually own or the radio show that came much later, but there are pieces of what I learned from him that undoubtedly traveled with me through all of it.

That's one of the strange things about people. They can leave our lives and still remain part of who we become.

There are others whose stories aren't as tragic as Joe's. In fact, with most of them I simply lost track. Somebody left for another dealership, somebody moved away, somebody changed careers, somebody retired, and somebody probably just got tired of dealing with me. We promised to stay in touch, and perhaps for a while we did, but the calls became less frequent, Christmas cards stopped coming, telephone numbers changed and life kept moving.

There probably wasn't even a real goodbye.

That's the part I find so interesting when I look back. Somebody who had been part of my life every day may have walked out of the dealership one afternoon and said, “See you tomorrow,” or “Have a good weekend,” and neither of us had the slightest idea that we might never see each other again. There was no music playing, no dramatic farewell and no warning that this particular ordinary conversation ought to be remembered. We were probably thinking about the next customer, the next deal or getting home for dinner.

I've thought about customers the same way. There were people who bought car after car from us until they almost felt like employees. You watched young couples become parents, and eventually their children needed cars. Sometimes those kids grew up and came back with families of their own. There were customers I knew well enough that when I saw their name on a deal jacket, I knew exactly who they were before I ever saw them, and there are names from those years that still occasionally surface in my memory and make me wonder how their lives turned out.

I wonder whether the young couple who stretched every dollar they had to buy their first new car stayed married and built the life they were planning. I wonder what became of the kid who came to work for me because somebody told him he might be good at selling cars. Maybe he stayed in the business and owns a dealership today, or maybe he lasted three weeks and became a dentist. I wonder about the technician who could fix anything, the salesperson who always made everybody laugh, the receptionist everybody loved, and even the employee who drove me absolutely crazy at the time but somehow makes me smile when I think about him today.

Life is filled with temporary people we don't realize are temporary, and I don't mean that in a sad way. I think it's simply part of living long enough to look backward. People enter our story for a chapter, some stay for several chapters, and a handful are there almost from beginning to end. Most, however, eventually turn the page in a different direction while we continue writing our own story.

What strikes me now is how permanent those relationships seemed while we were living them. When you're 35 years old and working beside somebody every day, you don't think, “I should pay attention because someday I'll wonder what happened to this person.” You're trying to get through Saturday, make payroll, hit the sales objective, get that problem car fixed, take care of the angry customer and somehow deliver the 14 cars that all need to be ready at 6 o'clock.

Then you look up and 30 years have passed.

Radio has added an entirely different group of people to my life. For 25 years I've talked with callers every Saturday. Some called once, others called many times, and I've received emails from listeners for years only to suddenly realize I haven't heard from somebody in a long time. One of the unusual things about doing a radio show for this long is that listeners sometimes know far more about me than I know about them. You've heard stories about my career, my family, my successes, my failures and probably more of my opinions than you ever asked to know, while I may know you only as a first name and a city. Yet we've shared Saturday mornings for years, and that is a relationship too.

I suppose what I've come to understand is that we don't get to know which people will remain in our lives and which ones are simply passing through, and maybe that's why we should be a little more aware of the people who are here right now. The coworker who occasionally gets on your nerves may someday be somebody you'd give anything to have lunch with again. The old friend whose call you keep meaning to return may eventually stop calling. The employee you appreciate but have never actually told may leave without ever knowing what you thought of him.

Years later, something will trigger a memory. It might be a song, a restaurant, an old photograph or a car you haven't seen in decades, and suddenly somebody you haven't thought about in years is standing right there in your mind. You'll remember the face, the voice, the laugh and perhaps some ridiculous thing that happened one afternoon that nobody else on earth would find funny.

For a few seconds, 30 years disappears.

I don't have an answer for where most of those people are today. I hope life treated them well. I hope the people who worked for me remember more good days than bad ones, and I hope the customers felt we treated them fairly. I hope some of those people I lost touch with occasionally have one of those strange moments when my name pops into their heads and they wonder what became of me, although these days a Google search could probably clear that up pretty quickly.

Mostly, though, I'm grateful they were there.

When I look back over a lifetime in the car business, I don't remember nearly as many sales totals, gross profits, month-end reports or manufacturer objectives as you might think. I remember people. I remember characters like Dick, and I remember Joe MeHarg, who left this world far too young but left something of himself behind in a teenager who watched and learned from him.

Maybe that's what a life eventually becomes. Not the buildings we worked in, the titles printed on our business cards or the numbers on a financial statement, but a collection of people who shared part of the trip with us and left something behind when their road went another direction.

Some are still beside us, some went another way a long time ago, and some, like Joe, are no longer here at all.

But every once in a while, for no particular reason, one of them wanders back into my thoughts.

When that happens, I usually smile and remember.

And then I wonder where all the others are now.

Straight Talk and Honest Answers — always.

-Jerry