Years ago, when Jim Hinckley was a young man just getting started in the car business, he asked his grandfather Robert H. why he had moved the family's Dodge dealership from the central Utah farming town of Mount Pleasant, where it began in 1915, to downtown Ogden in 1927.
"Jim," said Robert H., "you can't sell cars to jackrabbits."
Jim Hinckley tells the family story with pride but also a twinge of sadness these days. Three months ago, the Hinckley Dodge dealership that survived the move from Mount Pleasant to Ogden and thrived for another 82 years was terminated as part of Chrysler Corp.'s government-mandated reduction.
Just like that, the oldest Dodge dealership in America bit the dust.
Fortunately for the Hinckleys, their Dodge dealership in Salt Lake City was not part of the paring-down that overnight put nearly 800 Chrysler dealers out of business — out of a total of about 3,200 dealerships.
The Hinckley car lot in Ogden remains in business selling used cars, parts and service — and if someone walks in and insists on buying a new car, well, they're just sent 30 miles south to Salt Lake.
It's an improvisation, but then, improvisation has always been part of selling cars. No one knows this better than 62-year-old Jim Hinckley. Maybe he wasn't around when the first car rolled off the first assembly line, but he personally knows people who were.
His grandfather was just a young man when he married a girl named Abrelia from Mount Pleasant and started selling cars there built by brothers Horace and John Dodge in Detroit.
Just one year earlier, in 1914, the Dodge brothers had been producing car components for Henry Ford when they decided they could build their own cars.
Few people jumped onto the Dodge Brothers bandwagon earlier than Robert H. Hinckley, and no one lasted longer.
In 1928, when Walter P. Chrysler took over after Horace and John Dodge died, Hinckley became an original member of the Chrysler family.
It's been a roller-coaster ride ever since. The Great Depression hit in the 1930s, and nobody could afford to buy cars. Then came World War II and nobody made cars.
After the war, about the time Jim was born and his father, Robert H. Hinckley Jr., and uncle, John S. Hinckley, were running the business with their father, the car boom came.
By the time Jim was 8, in 1955, Hinckley Dodge expanded to Salt Lake.
All was well until the early 1980s, when mismanagement brought Chrysler perilously close to bankruptcy and it took federally guaranteed loans to save the carmaker.
"I thought that was tough," says Jim, "but only Chrysler was in trouble back then — not everyone in the industry. In many ways what's happening now is tougher."
He admits he was "shocked, sad and angry" when the Ogden dealership was terminated in the spring. Shocked that it happened at all, sad that it happened to the oldest dealership in the chain and angry that the ax fell so impersonally.
That morning, Chrysler sent a FedEx letter to each of its 3,200 dealerships. One said you were in. One said you were out. You either got the good letter or the bad letter.
"It was a horrible way to do it," says Jim. "We got the bad letter at Ogden. But we got the good letter at Salt Lake."
A man with an easy, likeable manner, Jim Hinckley, third-generation car dealer, smiles as he again brings the present back to the past through wise words from the man who got everything started 94 years ago.
"My grandfather always said that there's no problem so big in the car business that selling another car won't solve," he says.
"The message there," he adds, "is quit feeling sorry for yourself and get out there and sell another car."
Lee Benson's column runs Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com.