It began with David Vaughn’s dad. His father being mechanic nearly all of his life, Vaughn started working with him at age 7. Yet the elder Vaughn never made the leap to total autonomy. “I always tried to get him to get his own shop,” says David, “but he was afraid to, fearing this or that could happen. So when I got old enough, I started my own around 1979. I also worried about how things were going to turn out, but we’ve done okay.”
Vaughn Repair Shop is located in South Amherst, OH. This town of 1700 lies near the Ohio Turnpike corridor, roughly halfway between Cleveland and Sandusky. With the drain of heavy industry from the Midwest, the region has taken a huge economic hit. “We knew what was going on,” reports Vaughn, “but we never felt it. I was truly worried--there were a lot of places that had absolutely no work for days on end, but we always had some sort of work. Honestly I was surprised; we still had our good customers.”
That customer base pulls from surrounding towns like Lorain, Elyria and Oberlin, where there’s a college.
They also service vehicles for an ambulance company, a client they’ve had for 28 years. “We try to advertise as much as we can, but most of it is word-of-mouth: relatives, neighbors, friends; that works better than advertising,” says Vaughn. “Then there’s the towing—that’s a whole different story. It helps balance things out if you have a bad month with repairs; towing can make up the difference and vice versa.”
Towing has been part of the company’s DNA since the beginning. “When I went into business I bought the equipment of the guy I was working for, and he had a wrecker,” Vaughn recounts. “The wrecker was in pretty rough shape; I bought it mainly for our own use and not commercial. But then we started to get a few more requests, then some of the police departments started calling us to retrieve wrecks, because at that time there weren’t a lot of wreckers around here.”
The wrecker service soon went beyond mere retrieval; for Vaughn’s son and head technician, David, Jr., it became a collection. “He’s got a ’57 Chevy one ton wrecker, and a ’72 Chevy one ton,” cites Vaughn. “We have a ’50-’51 model Chevy wrecker and a ’48 Ford wrecker. And he has an older Dodge 4x4; I think it’s probably a late ‘60s/early ‘70s—it’s really nice. The ’72 Chevy is very usable; so is the Dodge. Just yesterday we had a vehicle that was reportedly 1000 feet off the road through some fields; our 4WD Dodge was our best bet at getting it out. One of the [attending] firemen was even more interested in the old wrecker than the wreck.”
As it turned out the car was more like a quarter mile off the road and they ended up having to use an excavator to get it out. But if you’re wondering how such a feat was possible, Vaughn heard that a teenager was allegedly making a left hand turn into a doctor’s office and passed out, careening in a perfectly straight line till he hit a tree. No drugs, alcohol or injuries were involved, just one of the crazier things Vaughn’s crew has witnessed.
Meanwhile, Junior’s collection reflects his father’s own love of cars: at last count Vaughn had 18, everything from a ’24 Model T to an ’81 Corvette, most of which he’s obtained from out West. “California, Arizona, Utah, to avoid the rust and rot,” he reports. “I can live with a car if it has a bad motor; I hate a car that’s got rust.”
Vaughn has 6-7 lifts at home just to work on his collection, but just having some of the cars and wreckers at the shop generates interest. “Even if just you’re driving one to work,” he says, “people stop in to say ‘wow’, and sometimes you will get a customer from that.”
Between the steady clientele and wrecker service, Vaughn opened a second location a little over a year and a half ago—although that wasn’t the original plan. “It’s definitely a large step,” he laughs. “We were going to build a new facility, but we just couldn’t afford it. So we found this location; it was already up, ready, and it had everything in it we needed except lifts.”
But what was meant to be an overflow facility for the main shop soon morphed into a full blown store. “I honestly didn’t want anyone over here,” Vaughn concedes. “Our parking lot went from empty to full really fast--I was really surprised. We’re not that far from the other shop, within 5-6 miles; now it’s as busy here as it is there.”
Amazingly, neither store seems to be poaching customers from the other. “They’re just filtering over here because some of them live on this end of town, or they may have a diesel, and we do most of that work here,” theorizes Vaughn. “Our quality hasn’t fallen off; if that happens we’ll go back to where we were. The one thing that we’ll always offer is quality to our customers, not some—excuse the expression—half-assed job.” Vaughn runs the new shop with assistance from one technician, while his son David, Jr. runs the other with a couple part time techs, and occasional visits from Senior.
Ironically, unlike his father before him, Vaughn didn’t want any of his own offspring following him into the industry. Besides Junior working as a technician and doing some of the wrecker runs, his daughter runs the office, his wife the books, and youngest child Nick works as a consultant for repair shops. “We’re all involved in it,” he smiles. “Over the last few years I’ve stayed in the shop to do more repair work than I am on the road. Without them I don’t think things would run like they do.”
