I followed him across the showroom floor and up the stairs. When we reached his office, he opened the door and stepped aside to let me in. The room was plain-a straight-legged wooden desk, a couch, three chairs, and white walls on which he’d mounted numerous black-and-white photographs of himself with various local bigwigs. The Cromwell Chamber of Commerce had given him a citation for community service. The furniture might well have been the set he started business with. “Did you graduate from college?” he asked as he rounded his desk and took a seat.

I sat down across from him, putting my shoulder bag on the floor at my feet. “Hardly. I had two semesters of junior college, but I don’t think that counts.”

“Better than I did. My father dug ditches for a living and never saved a dime. My senior year in high school, he was killed in an auto accident. It’d been raining for a week, highway was slick as glass, and he went off a bridge. I was the oldest of four boys and I had to go to work. One thing my dad taught me was never do manual labor. He hated his job. He said, ‘Son, if you want to make money, find a job where you have to shower before you go to work instead of when you get home.’ He maintained there was always someone for hire when it came to the dirty work, and I’ve followed that to this day.”

“How’d you end up selling cars?”

“Desperation. Everything turned out fine in the end, but it didn’t look so promising at first. The only fellow who’d hire me was George Blickenstaff, owner of the local Ford dealership. He was an old family friend and I guess he took pity on me. I started selling Fords when I was nineteen years old. That was 1925. I didn’t much care for it, but at least I wasn’t working with my hands. Turns out I had a knack for sales. Four years later, the stock market crashed.”

“That must have put a dent in the business.”

“Some areas, yes, but not as much out here. We were always small potatoes and we didn’t take the same hit the bigger dealers did. By the time the Depression came along, I was doing pretty well, at least compared to what a lot of other folks endured. By then, I’d turned into Blickenstaff’s star salesman. You’d have thought it was something I was born to do. Of course, I was full of myself and thought I deserved a dealership of my own.”

“Is that when you bought this place?”