I've worked on cars in Macon for forty years. I've owned this shop for twenty-eight.

I grew up on Anthony Road, two miles east of where my shop sits now. My father worked at the Brown & Williamson tobacco plant on Eisenhower Parkway for thirty-seven years. He kept a tool chest in the garage and he kept the family Caprice running on weekends, and that's where I learned that a man who knows his car doesn't get cheated.

I graduated from Southwest High School in 1984. Two years at Central Georgia Tech for automotive technology — finished in 1986. Twelve years after that I was at the Macon Ford dealership on Riverside Drive, working as a B-tech and then an A-tech, doing warranty work and customer-pay general repair.

I left in September 1996. I opened Earl's Garage that October with four thousand four hundred dollars in savings, a handshake loan from my uncle Wendell, and my father's tool chest from the Brown & Williamson plant. One bay. One lift. A telephone Sandra answered from our apartment two blocks away.

Why I went independent.

The dealership paid us on a flat-rate book — every job had a published hour count, and the more hours you punched, the more you took home. The service writers worked the same way, on commission off the parts and labor they wrote up. So if a customer came in for a coolant top-off and his car had 62,000 miles, the service writer was paid to recommend a $1,200 cooling-system flush whether the car needed it or not.

I watched it for twelve years. I watched older customers — widows, retirees, folks who'd just bought the car used — sign off on work they didn't need because they trusted the white shirt and tie behind the counter. I watched the parts come off the car and go straight into the bin behind the building. The customer never saw what they paid for.

I have nothing bad to say about the men I worked with at Ford. They were doing their job. But it was a system, and the system was designed to get the most money it could out of every customer who pulled up. One Tuesday morning in September 1996 I came in, did my shift, walked out at five o'clock, and never went back.

The shop today.

Two bays, two lifts. I expanded into the second bay in 2003 when the dry-cleaner next door went out of business and I bought the building cheap. I work the floor Monday through Friday. Marcus comes in Thursday and Friday afternoons — he's in his second year of the auto-tech program at Central Georgia Tech and I'm paying his tools while he learns. Sandra, my wife of thirty-one years, answers the phone from the kitchen at the back of the building. I do not have a service writer. I do not have a parts manager. I am the mechanic, the service writer, and the parts manager. On Saturday mornings I'm also the guy who sweeps the floor.

About thirty-five service tickets a week. About two hundred and forty regular customers, most of whom I've worked on for over a decade. A handful of customers who started with me when I opened in 1996 are still on my schedule today — their first car was a Crown Victoria, their current car is a 2018 Camry, and they're still paying my labor rate.

What Earl believes.

I believe a mechanic should tell you the truth about your car. I believe you should pay a fair price and not a penny more. I believe if I can't fix it, I should send you to someone who can.

I believe in showing you the old part before I install the new one. I'd rather lose a job than do work that's not needed. I believe the chain shops have driven a generation of folks into never trusting a mechanic again, and that's a shame, because most of us are honest men trying to do a fair job.

Sandra says I'm bad at business. Maybe. But I sleep fine, my customers keep coming back, and my daughter is going to be the third generation of Tomlinsons to graduate Central Georgia Tech automotive — she starts next fall. That's the only ledger I keep.

"My dad worked at Brown & Williamson for thirty-seven years. He always said 'do the work right or don't do it.' That's the only rule I run this shop on." — Earl Tomlinson