Oral History: Sallie Gavey Rasmussen – July, 2008

Summary:

Sallie Gavey Rasmussen was interviewed by Julie Sullivan in July, 2008. Her father, Warren Gavey, operated an auto body shop at 3442 Mt. Diablo Boulevard from 1946 to 1965, on a lot which contained both their home and the auto repair business. Sallie remembers what it was like to grow up and go through high school in the community in those years: afternoons spent hanging out in the drugstore with its soda fountain and racks of comic books, dining at Rick’s Drive-in near Acalanes High school, and seeing the show at the Park Theatre on Friday nights.

Oral History:

“My dad did such a beautiful job you couldn’t tell a car had ever been damaged,” Sallie Gavey Rasmussen remembers her father’s business at 3442 Mt. Diablo Boulevard. The auto body shop was adjacent to the former Butler-Conti auto dealership. “My dad and his partner used torches and melted lead. They actually sculpted the metal for the body. They used to have a big sign that said ‘Beautiful Body Gavey,’” she adds with a laugh.

Warren Gavey bought the property in 1946. It included a house close to the street, where the family lived, and a barn on the hill behind it, which he converted for his business. Prior to that, Warren had been in the auto body repair business in Berkeley. He was born in 1910 in New York state and grew up in Walnut Creek, graduating at age 17 from Mt. Diablo High School. “He wanted to graduate earlier, but he had an old maid principal who wouldn’t let him,” Sallie recalls. “She told him he could take any classes he wanted, so he organized a boys’ cooking class.”

At age 17, Warren, who was always mechanical, bought a Curtiss-Wright airplane and learned to fly. Sallie’s mother, Camilla, grew up in Berkeley and met Warren at a church group. The couple eloped to Reno in 1931 when Warren was 20 and Camilla was 17. After high school Warren worked for Shell refinery in Martinez during the day and built the family’s first house there at night. “It’s still there,” Sallie adds.

Sallie was born in 1939 and her brother Paul in 1941, the year Shell transferred Warren to Texas. “My dad had a 1941 Chevrolet coupe he bought brand new for $675,” Sallie remembers. “We drove in it to Texas. It had a swamp cooler with a pull chain for cooling.” The family moved back to the Bay Area in 1943 and settled in Berkeley. Warren opened his own auto body business and worked on the Oakland municipal buses, also making plastic equipment parts as part of the war effort. When Sallie’s mother became ill, Warren found the property in Lafayette where he could have his business near home.

“It was like moving out to the country,” Sallie remembers. “There was a walnut orchard along Mt. Diablo Boulevard next to our house. When we moved in I don’t believe Butler-Conti was there yet.

“My dad always had four or five cars in his shop at a time. His partner, Johnny Garberino, who was really an employee but my dad called a partner, worked with my dad for 20 years. My dad and his friend, who worked for a newspaper in Berkeley, used to make up clever newspaper ads for the Lafayette Sun. His friend would come to our house once a week to have dinner and cut my dad’s hair, then we’d all sit at the dining room table and make up the ads. Herman Silverman, who ran the Sun, got a big kick out of the ads and would banter back and forth with my dad and his friend.

“A lot of the cars my dad worked on were made in the 1930’s. I remember people brought in the car called the Henry J, which was made by Kaiser. Daddy had a Pierce Arrow, which was kind of like a limo, that he restored. Very few people had auto insurance in the early years. Mostly they paid for the repairs themselves. A lot of high school boys brought their cars in, and my dad told them how to do the work themselves.

“My dad always liked to cook, and he would often barbecue outside our house in Lafayette. When people saw him there on Sundays, they’d come right up to him and ask for an estimate! Even though we lived next to my dad’s business, my folks had a good routine,” Sallie says. “We always ate breakfast together, which my dad cooked, then he came back home for lunch, and for dinner we ate together. Then my dad would go back and paint cars till 10:00 or 11:00 p.m.”

The auto shop opened at 8:00 a.m. and closed at 5:00 p.m. six days a week. “We never took vacations once my dad worked for himself,” Sallie remembers. “Once in 1945 we took a long weekend when my dad helped build a cabin. That’s the only vacation I remember. If you worked for yourself you didn’t expect a vacation.

“The body shop was a hard job. My dad didn’t make huge amounts of money, but he got by. I used to go to Girl Scout camp in the summer for two weeks, but it cost $40, and every year my parents had to struggle to come up with the money. That was a lot back then. When he was young my dad was a master Mason, but once he started the business he didn’t have time to attend meetings. Both my parents were avid readers. My mother was an artist, and many of her paintings hung in our house.”

During World War II Warren had a tire vulcanizing business. He recapped tires using the high heat, vulcanizing, process. “He built a separate room to do it,” Sallie explains, “And after the war it became a paint booth.

“The auto body shop was a labor intensive business. They didn’t buy a whole lot of parts; they rebuilt the old ones. Business was always better in winter because the streets got slippery from the rain, and there were more accidents. People used to roll their cars in those days. There used to be a lot of head-on collisions when Mt. Diablo was a three lane road. My dad had the AAA towing service and he would pull cars out of canyons, then fix the damage where they had hit the trees on the way down.

“I remember my family was driving home from Berkeley on high school graduation night, and two teenagers in the car in front of ours went off the road into a canyon. My dad drove the kids, who weren’t hurt, all the way home to Port Chicago. Their car, a 1941 Chevrolet fast back with powder blue finish, was towed to his shop, and he repaired it. A lot of the time we got our parts from wrecking yards.

“In the early days all you needed to repair the paint finish was a can of black paint, but by the time I was a teenager cars had a lot more colors. My dad had to blend the colors so that they matched where the car’s original paint had faded. Daddy had a good eye for color, and you could never see any scratch marks when he was done. He had to custom mix the colors to match, then he hand striped all the trim, using a little striping brush.

“I spent a lot of time following my dad around,” she adds with a chuckle. “From the time I was about 12 I’d help him mask cars for painting in the evenings after dinner. Occasionally I got paid. My brother wasn’t as interested as I was, but he put himself through college at Cal Berkeley by running a service station at the corner of Mt. Diablo and Golden Gate Way.

“When we were younger we didn’t have a lot of neighbors because we were in the country. We hiked up Brown Avenue with the neighbor kids then all over the hills. Daddy put a whistle on the compressor in the shop so he could blow it to signal us it was time to come home for lunch. We walked to Lafayette Grammar School, but we had to stay on our side of Mt. Diablo because my parents were afraid to have us cross where we lived. We walked over two hills until we came to the one and only traffic signal at Moraga Boulevard.”

Sallie remembers shopping in Oakland when she was a teenager. “We’d take the bus to Capwell’s store or a show. That was a big deal. Lafayette had the Clothes Horse, and Sutton’s Shoes had a machine where you could x-ray your feet. We made sure we had plenty of room in our shoes. If the shoes happened to wear out before we outgrew them, we cut a new sole out of cardboard from the shredded wheat cereal box and put it in.”

Sallie and her brother, Paul, graduated from Acalanes High School. Sallie married in 1959 and moved to Nevada. She later divorced, then married Garth Rasmussen. She has three children, two sons and a daughter. Her father sold the business in 1965, and her parents moved to Nevada in 1971. “After my dad retired he renewed his pilot’s license and built a ‘Fly Baby’ experimental airplane in the garage,” she remembers. “It had an open cockpit. He flew from Buchanan Field in Concord. He’d bring parts he was working on into the house from time to time. Later, after he moved to Nevada, he’d rent planes and take our family on scenic rides.”

Warren and Camilla Gavey both passed away in 2005 within months of each other. They were married 74 years.

Sallie earned her LPN degree in 1964 and worked as a nurse. In 1973 she and her husband bought Economy Speed Press in Carson City, the first instant press there. She ran the print shop for five years then went back to nursing briefly before returning to run the business. Her daughter is an RN, and one of her sons is a Physician’s Assistant.

Growing up in Lafayette meant “going to the drug store after school because it had a fountain, and they let us read the comic books,” Sallie says. “We spent lots of time in the dime store figuring how to spend our allowance. Even though we only got a quarter a week, we saved it up to buy something big, like a six dollar pair of skates. The Sun had a contest to sell subscriptions. If you sold enough you could get a pogo stick, which I did. Most high school kids didn’t have cars. If your boyfriend had a car, the girl borrowed it to go to Rick’s Drive-in near Acalanes High School. Friday nights we always went to the Park Theater. That was our date. When we were younger we could get in for 15 cents until about age 12. We’d try to fake it because the price went up to around 25 cents.

“Not many families had TV sets. We went to our neighbor’s house to watch TV until we finally got one, a black and white. On the way home from grammar school we’d stop in town and get an ice cream or candy bar. When I was a teenager a big date for me was going to the new Rheem Theater, which was very fancy.

“I don’t believe the feeling of Lafayette has changed that much,” she reflects. “People are there because they take pride in it as their home. There was always a sense of community, with people helping each other. I think if anything the town’s appearance has improved. I miss it being less crowded. There are houses everywhere.

“It was always a sophisticated town. There were always lots of people who commuted into San Francisco. Lots of people were well off, but they didn’t look down their noses at us who weren’t. When I was growing up you had to have Spalding shoes and Pendleton skirts, but they didn’t look down on us because we didn’t. People were much less materialistic, and hardly anyone was divorced. Few women worked.”

Excerpted from “Voices of Lafayette” by Julie Sullivan. This book is available for purchase in the History Room.