THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, November 27, 1994 TAG: 9411240220
SECTION: CHESAPEAKE CLIPPER PAGE: 02 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: Random Rambles
SOURCE: Tony Stein
LENGTH: Medium: 89 lines
There is an age-darkened newspaper clipping pinned up in Dave Schloff's office at Great Bridge Exxon. ``Work hard eight hours a day,'' it says, ``and maybe someday you can buy the business and work hard 12 hours a day.''
Dave's wife, Judy, tacked it up because the Schloffs know the drill. They first learned it a long time ago, because Dave has just reached his 20th anniversary as owner-operator of the service station. He worked for another owner for two years before that.
Hitting his 20th anniversary as a Great Bridge business owner makes him a member of a kind of exclusive club. We're talking old Great Bridge here, back in the days before subdivisions multiplied like passionate bunnies. Up until the very early 1980s, when you said ``Great Bridge,'' you meant a tight little village. You meant the pure and simple boonies.
Survivors of those times include Robert Cooke and his hardware store and John Lancaster, who owns Great Bridge Decorating. Arline Ferrell at Art's Jewelers in the Great Bridge Shopping Center is another veteran. She worked at Peoples Drug Store in the center when it opened in 1961. Arline is still around, though the Peoples store is gone.
Also absolutely, positively and unhappily gone is Great Bridge's day as the boonies. Schloff remembers when Battlefield Boulevard in front of his station had only two lanes, and two was all it needed. Now it's got five, and the cars jam like elephants in an elevator. Of course, if any of the cars break down, Schloff wouldn't mind if they limped into the station.
He's a tall 48-year-old with a pleasantly raspy voice who grew up as a farm boy in upstate New York. His father raised grapes and dairy cattle, so Dave could define the word ``work'' very early on. He milked cows, baled hay, picked grapes - the whole agricultural array. But if he had cow faucets in one hand, the other hand got accustomed to holding wrenches. There was a lot of machinery on the farm and the farm family kept it running. ``We didn't pay someone,'' Dave says. ``We had to fix it ourselves.''
He did a three-year hitch in the Marine Corps after high school, winding up in Norfolk. While he was still a Marine, he worked part-time as a mechanic at a Wards Corner service station. Part time became full-time when he got out. Then his boss made him manager of the Great Bridge station. Two years later, with his boss's help, Dave became the dealer.
That's why he can look at that newspaper clipping about long hours and say ``How true.'' He and one other man ran the station from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. seven days a week. Fortunately, they got more help before they had to be carted off to the nearest rest home.
These days, Dave has 19 employees, including five mechanics. And if the village around the station has changed mightily, so has the car repair business. When Dave started out, he says, a mechanic could set up in business for about $500. Hand tools and a couple of electronic gauges and you were ready to dive under the hood. No more. There's a $30,000 analyzing machine in Dave's shop to deal with today's computerized cars.
The by-guess-and-by-gosh era is over. You can hook a meter in the car and go for a drive while the car's on-board computer ``talks'' to the meter. Then you hook the meter into the station's computer and you get a diagnosis of the problem.
But Dave notes that even the most sophisticated, computer-loaded set of wheels needs basic nursemaiding. The cheapest and best thing you can do for your car, he says, is change the oil every 3,000 miles. Change the filter, too. If you don't, you're still sloshing a quart of dirty oil through the engine.
More basics from Auto Dr. Dave: Read the owner's manual.
Also, pay attention to how your car sounds. Car trouble often makes noise ahead of time. Listen up and you might save yourself a checkbook full of woe later on.
Away from the station, Dave likes to ride his new Harley-Davidson motorcycle and play a little golf. Too little to be any good, he says. But he does not drag race any more. That hobby ended in 1984 when the rear end of his racer dissolved at 150 miles an hour. He escaped in one piece but with a whole medical dictionary full of bruises.
``It was an expensive hobby,'' he says, ``and I had kids starting college.'' Not to mention no more 150-mph wipeouts.
The kids in the Schloff clan include Dave Jr., 26; Laura, 25; Michelle, 23; and Brian, 21.
Dave is a Dallas Cowboy football fan deep in the heart of Redskin country, so you know he has to keep a sense of humor. But he's dead serious about what his business means to him. ``We take a lot of pride in our community,'' he says. ``We figure a lot of people depend on us and we're not gonna let them down.''
So remember, motorists: Read your manual, change the oil every 3,000 miles and, in the unlikely event that the Redskins ever beat the Cowboys, don't mention it to Dave. He'll be hurting enough already. by CNB