|
‘It’s time,’ Hooper says of retirement
In almost 30 years on Main Street, George Hooper has seen it all – and he’s taken most of it out of a tire at one time or another.
George, a two-term county commissioner who owned Sylva Tire Co. for nearly three decades (from early 1975 until his retirement last week), said he’s “taken everything in the world” out of tires when people bring them in to be repaired.
He started by telling me about a local priest who went to see one of his parishioners, but, as he was driving up to the house, a “big, mean dog” came out.
The dog kept barking and biting at the tire, George said, and pretty soon the priest heard the air going out.
“He had to back up a quarter-mile to get away from the dog,” George said.
That was in the early ’80s and was the first time George had ever heard of a dog biting a hole in a tire.
“I’ve seen a lot since then,” he said.
Foreign objects George and his crew have removed from tires include bones and teeth (from “road kill,” George said), wood, plastic, every kind of bolt, screw and nail, wrenches, screwdrivers, forks and spoons – “just about anything that could be lying in the road.”
It was necessity that put George in the tire business. He had been working for Mead Corp. for 10 years when the paper company closed its Sylva plant in 1975.
“I had to have a job,” he said. “I’d always changed tires out on the road when I was in the trucking business (before he started with Mead), so I was familiar with it.”
Sylva Tire Co. was established in 1951 by Guy Leatherwood, who sold it to Cannon Brothers in 1973. George bought the business two years later.
George said what he’ll miss the most when he’s not at the store every day is the people.
“There’s always so many good ones that you forget about the ones that irk you,” he said.
Sylva Tire’s original location, a small building next to the old Ford place at the N.C. 107/Main Street intersection, was torn down in May to make way for a new Eckerd’s drug store, but it was no longer Sylva Tire by then. George moved his operation to the former Hensley Tire Co. when Paul Hensley retired in 1999.
The biggest change he’s noticed is the improvements to tires and automobiles over the past 30 years.
“When it comes to tires, they’re probably four to one better,” George said. “The mileage is super compared to what it was.
“There have been super improvements to cars, too. Almost any car will go between 100,000 and 200,000 miles, and they ride so much better,” he said.
Another thing George did before becoming a tire store owner was spend some time on the race-car circuit – then called the Grand National, later Winston Cup and now Nextel.
Among the drivers he met during that time was the legendary Richard Petty.
As George tells it, he was in Bristol, Tenn., working on his team’s car, which had developed a problem.
“The rear end had gotten hot and was smoking, and I was under the car on a dolly to see if I could drain the oil out,” George said. “Richard was walking around because he had wrecked in the third lap. He saw the smoke and was afraid I’d get burned, so he got hold of my feet and pulled me out.
“He said, ‘Son, there’s always bad days, but they’ll get better,’” George said.
George got a chance to repay Petty’s kindness in 1967 at Darlington when Petty was in a bad crash.
“He broke his arm and was upside down,” George said. “We started out there and unbuckled Richard and eased him out of the car.”
During his racing days, George was briefly around another legend – Junior Johnson.
“Junior didn’t drive after 1966,” George said. “I rubbed shoulders with some of the older race drivers.”
George was part of the pit crew for Sgt. Roy Mayne, and the car Mayne drove belonged to Tom Hunter of Cashiers.
“We were the diehard Chevrolet people,” George said. “We ran one of very few Chevys on the track.”
George said he and Hunter were good friends who “just liked racing.”
When George decided he wanted to get into the sport, Hunter said he could help. Mayne was stationed at Shaw Air Force Base and Hunter met him at the race track.
“Roy was a good driver, but he didn’t have a car,” George said.
George liked racing but didn’t want to drive.
“I could see right quick I didn’t have the reflexes,” he said. Mayne, on the other hand, was “so fast – like a cat,” George said. “Reflexes are something you’re born with.”
It was tough to run 22 or so races a year, traveling from Michigan to Talledega, Charlotte and Atlanta, while working full time, but George said he enjoyed it.
Mayne finished fourth in the Southern 500 at Darlington in 1965 and sixth in Rockingham in 1966, George said.
Now that he’s sold Sylva Tire, George said he’s looking forward to some more traveling, but this time it will be in an RV.
“Most of the United States is country I haven’t seen,” he said. “I may not see it all, but I want to see some.”
George also says he plans to spend a lot more time at Lake Chatuge.
“It’s time to go, and I’m not going to look back,” George said. “That’s something Jim Ed Haskett taught me before he died. He said when you make up your mind to retire, do it and don’t look back.”
|
