Early in my career I became temporarily disallusioned with the life of a motorcycle mechanic. I had started with excellent formal training and had worked for a few southern California shops and was at a point where I decided to take a breather and maybe think about what to do next. Meantime I had to still make a living so I went to work for a very well known Honda dealer as a parts counterman. It wasn’t the first time I had worked behind the parts counter, but this time it was memorable.

I quickly became friends with the Service Manager—we just immediate hit it off, having much of the same background—and as a dealer service department is always looking for support in Parts, everyone in the store agreed I was a good fit to be the official liason between the two departments. I could find them parts that might be from another model but would work, for example, and of course with a mechanic’s background I viewed things from the service perspective. We also happened to have an exceptionally well-run Parts department—we actually stocked things, which helped a lot. In a short time I got to know all the guys in Service (two out of the five mechanics I still maintained contact with forty years later), though they probably initially viewed me as someone who could talk the talk but not walk the walk, so to speak.

So imagine what happened when I decided my “vacation” from wrenching was over and made it clear to the Service Manager that I wanted to work for him. So I did. I went to work with the guys I had been supporting with a supply of service parts. And due to my “fresh” start and an established friendship with the Service Manager, I was trusted and empowered and soon worked in the best service environment I ever had done. It took a while to gain the acceptance of the other guys, but it wasn’t long before they observed that I was one of them. They even decided that I was not getting special treatment from the Service Manager even though it was obvious we were good friends.

This was the best managed Honda Service Department I ever worked in. The Service Manager, a former independent shop owner himself, understood how to develop respect and trust with his team of mechanics. For example, he kept a file in which he stored up miscellaneous labor hours that accumulated—often through warranty work—that he could disburse as needed to mechanics who had taken a monetary beating on a particular job. He also worked this just as meaningfully on the front end of things by writing up repair orders like a mechanic would, that made sense and therefore protected and benefitted the mechanic, and were at the same time good for the customer. In fact, he had a manner with customers I have seldom seen in others. They just immediately trusted him. Only one other shop I worked for wrote such good, practical repair orders, with diagnostic time, time for incidental work, etc. And the working environment was healthy and progressive and supportive—it made you want to do your best. That Service Manager and I kept in touch through the years—we actually ended up giving each other references that got us both jobs—until he and his wife eventually passed on.

If there was any favoritism toward me at all in this shop, and I suppose there was a little though the Service Manager tried to keep things fair—he really was that kind of a guy, who despite our friendship realized he had to also guard the morale of the other mechanics—it was that I was given most of the work that came in on a particular model I really liked to work on. Word got out even that I was tuning these bikes and folks came from all over. Who could ask for more? It’s a good memory.

This shop was a major player in the 1980s Honda dealership world in Southern California. The owner of the shop was part of a famous Honda car dealership family. So it was big-time, serious, and in many ways a throwback to the early days of motorcycling. I came later to realize that the best dealerships anywhere in the country were often owned by a family that had an abiding passion for being a dealer, not just from a sales standpoint. Later I worked for another major dealer who was also like this one, in it for the love of motorcycles. It really makes a difference.

In fact this later dealership asked us mechanics for input in how to set up a new workshop building and when it was finished it was like we had all died and gone to heaven. Such an efficient layout and arrangement of everything: lifts, oil distribution, air supply, a parts window for the Service Dept., all of that. It was wonderful. And the best part as always was the attitude of everyone who worked there, even the Parts people. This was during the mid 1980s when the Honda V4s first emerged and this dealer was kind of known for its work on them. All of the pictures I have of this period have Sabres and Interceptors in them. Again, a great memory.

Much later when I worked for manufacturers (first Honda’s then Kawasaki’s corporate offices) and could analyze the dealer environment from the other side, I discovered there were many more dealerships like these two. There was a dealer in Minnesota for example who put a small crane in each mechanic’s stall, and sunk the lifts into the floor and had a guy polish the concrete floor of the shop each week. That’s passion! And mechanics like to stay with dealers that are like this and not move around like so many do in this industry.

So yes, in addition to the bad, there has also been the good, at the dealership. The bad maybe sticks in our minds at times, but the good, well, it sure was good!