Dealership loss rips fabric of Pa. town

Sandy Lake, Pa.

There is a long-held belief among some Methodists and Mennonites and Amish who inhabit the rolling farmlands around this western Pennsylvania hamlet that God shall reward those who work hard.

So imagine the confusion of Bobby Kaltenbaugh when he received a plain white envelope containing a one-page letter from Detroit informing him that after 76 years, General Motors Corp. is severing ties with his dealership.

The unsigned letter, dated May 14, ended with this dry-mouth salutation:

"Sincerely, General Motors Corporation"

The threatened loss of Walker Chevrolet has sent ripples of uncertainty across the small community of Sandy Lake, which in ways big and small depends on the family-owned business.

"They don't want you any more," said Kaltenbaugh, the owner of Walker Chevrolet. Kaltenbaugh, 61, spent his entire life in Sandy Lake except for a tour in Vietnam. He lives next to the dealership at the intersection of Main and Franklin streets and across the road from the house where he was born. He sold his first car in 1971, an Impala to a man named Kennedy.

"After three generations in the business, it's hard to feel like you're not a failure," he said glumly. "God didn't leave me but GM did."

Once considered the cornerstone of the American economy, General Motors is fighting not only to be relevant in the new world economy, but simply to be. As part of its restructuring, the nation's largest carmaker announced that it is ending its relationship with 2,600 dealerships over the next three years. The shockwaves of that decision are reverberating from Jefferson Avenue to Main Street, Small Town, U.S.A. -- places like Sandy Lake -- whose identity has been shaped by its very relationship with Detroit.

Sandy Lake -- population 696 -- is 265 miles east of Detroit but a world away. A yard sale along Highway 62 on the outskirts of town is enough to cause a traffic jam. There is one stoplight in the center of town where you will find the dealership. Also there is the bank, the restaurant, the gas station, the dentist, the insurance man. The volunteer fire company is stationed there too and uses a retrofitted 1980 GMC 13-speed for a pumper truck. Mostly they battle chimney fires and occasionally honey bees that make their nests in the attic. The police blotter is full of barking dogs and teenagers squealing tires.

The town has one cop, Chief Donald Oakes, whose first job was "warshing cars" at Walker Chevrolet more than 30 years ago. People here seem to die only of old age, said the chief, informing two visitors that there have been just two murders in Sandy Lake in the last hundred years, both of them matters of a broken heart.

"If they shut that dealership down, it will kill the whole town," said the chief, dressed in a T-shirt as he had been called out of bed over reports of two suspicious men taking photographs on Main Street. "That place is the heart and soul of this community."

Loss will be 'devastating'

The dealership is by no means a piston in the General Motors machine. It sells perhaps 70 new cars and 80 used cars a year and employs 12 people, which accounts for seven percent of the jobs in Sandy Lake. But consider the dealership's importance to the social fabric here. Thousand of kids at the local high school learned to drive in a car donated by Walker Chevrolet. The students are Kaltenbaugh's people, which in turn makes them Chevy people. The Little League team gets its uniforms from Walker Chevrolet. The fire truck its tires. The church its paint. The Fourth of July parade its fireworks. The Pioneer Days jubilee its best sponsor.

Then there is the business multiplier effect. When Walker closes, the bank loses 150 car payments. The insurance man 150 policies. The gas station loses its gas concession from Kaltenbaugh. The auto parts shop its best customer in Kaltenbaugh. The restaurant gets fewer people coming to try the ham loaf. When Walker Chevrolet goes, all that will be left is an empty lot and a peeling building on the corner of Franklin and Main.

"There are four things that make a small town a small town," said Ray Kaltenbaugh, the president of the Mercer County State Bank. "A successful small town has a bank, a hardware store, a grocery store and the car dealership. Take one out and you've replaced it with a huge blight. It will be just devastating."

As you might surmise, Ray Kaltenbaugh is the brother of Bobby Kaltenbaugh and, as it goes in small towns, prominent businesspeople are prominent citizens. Bobby is a former city councilman and Ray is a city councilman, as is the wife of Chief Oakes. Bobby's wife, Kathy, works as a teller at Ray's bank. Their father Bob -- who is called Old Bob in these parts to distinguish between him and his son Bobby -- formerly owned Walker Chevrolet, taking control of it from his father-in-law, Bud Walker. Old Bob Kaltenbaugh, too, is a former city councilman and founding member of the Rotary Club, which closed five years ago due to lack of young blood. Old Bob, like young Bobby, served in Southeast Asia, during World War II.

Old Bob is retired, but still comes to the dealership to bang out price lists on an old Royal typewriter. No one seems to have the heart to tell Old Bob that the price list is already composed on a computerized spread sheet. Old Bob distrusts computers.

"If you're a dime short in your calculations, you can't see it on a computer screen," laments Old Bob, 85. "You can find that dime in your ledger, though."

A dime. It is a quaint, old-time, small-town sentiment when looked at through the prism of a $454 billion federal deficit and General Motors on the verge of collapse, kept alive by billions of dollars in taxpayer money.

"These times aren't as hard as the Depression, so I don't understand GM's reasoning. We pay for the cars, the plaques, the banners. We don't cost them anything," Old Bob says.

His father-in-law opened Walker Chevrolet on its current plot in 1933, the fourth autumn of the Great Depression and the first of the Repeal of Prohibition. Unemployment then was 23.2 percent and the Dow was at 90. The bad times were at their pinnacle and yet the Walkers struggled through somehow. Today the national unemployment rate is 8.9 percent, the Dow hovers around 8,500.

Still, his grandson will be forced to close its doors October 2010.

Future unknown

For years, Sandy Lake lived upon the Manna of the Midwestern industrial might. The shipping town of Erie lay directly to its north, Pittsburgh and its steel to the south, Akron and its rubber to the west, and Oil City, Pa. -- the site of the first petroleum strike in the United States -- just 20 miles to its east. Those towns were one-time servants to the Detroit motor machine and Sandy Lake lived upon the tourists and the small spin-off jobs.

Now that Detroit has abandoned Sandy Lake, Bobby Kaltenbaugh looks for a new reason to be and a new place to take the bear and elk and mountain ram trophies that adorned the walls of his dealership.

"Aw, it's the best thing that ever happened to you, Bobby," said Frank Musser, the feed salesman who keeps pictures of all the trucks he's purchased over the past 25 years from Kaltenbaugh taped to his refrigerator. "You can do better without General Motors. You got the ability and the brains."

"I can't make it selling used cars," Kaltenbaugh answered.

"I don't know what I'm going to do. And I don't know what I'm going to do with the bear. My wife won't let me bring him home."

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