Larry Stanek was born in Minnesota, but the Skagit Valley encompasses his living memory. He was three years old when his family moved here in 1950 in pursuit of a job opportunity.  Larry was a guy who liked to work with his hands — an attribute that we at Meyer Sign & Advertising can certainly relate to — and his earliest career interest was in auto mechanics. He was sweeping floors at Cook Motors as an aspiring truck mechanic when an apprenticeship opportunity opened up in auto body repair. “It paid more than sweeping floors, so I became an auto body repairman,” Larry recalls. Brilliant careers have been started with less lofty ambitions.

After six years at Cook Motors, Larry hired on at Sims Ford in Sedro-Woolley. It was there that he met Forrest Bryant — better known as “Woody.” The two became fast friends and shared a youthful ambition to become their own bosses. It seemed like a modest enough vision at the time. “It was something different we thought we could make a living at,” says Larry, “and the work that we put out would be our work, not somebody else’s.” In 1980 they realized their goal and opened NW Autobody Collision & Restoration at the site where it remains to this day on Second Street in Mount Vernon. Larry was 30 years old.

The years went by, as the years do. NW Autobody thrived, and Larry and his wife Nancy raised three children (two boys and a girl). Even with the responsibilities of being a business owner and a family man, Larry went to work every day enjoying the job that he did. “When I compare auto body work to being a mechanic, I think of it like this: a mechanic does something, but you can’t visually see what he did. In the automotive repair business you paint a car, stand back and look at it and say, ‘I did that.’” Being in the sign business, that’s something else about Larry that we can relate to. It’s nice to have your work noticed.

The youngest of Larry and Nancy’s children, Jeremy, took an interest in his dad’s business, and began working at the shop as a teenager, paying his dues sanding and washing windows. Larry recalls his son’s start as having been a bit rocky. “His third day here I told him how to do a particular job and he looked at me and said, ‘That’s a stupid way to do it.’ He soon found out that I wasn’t ‘dad’ here…I was the boss. The next day he was working at McDonalds.” Jeremy was back a few weeks later with a newfound sense of humility. “He never called me ‘stupid’ again,” says Larry. He also never took another job again.

Tragedy struck NW Autobody in 2006 when Woody became ill and passed away that Thanksgiving. The company’s website offers this heartfelt tribute to its co-founder: “He always had a story to tell and greeted customers with sincerity and empathy. He was always patient and provided steady guidance to younger employees, from his years as an Auto Body instructor.” Larry and Nancy incorporated the business the following year, by which time Jeremy was acting as manager.

While the fundamentals of the auto body repair business remain much as they were when Larry and Woody set up shop in 1980, a lot about cars has changed over the years — starting with their basic composition. “It used to be that you took a piece of metal and repaired it,” Larry explains, “but with fewer things made of metal it is often more about replacement than repair.” Today’s auto materials run a wider gamut. “Steel, high strength steel, ultra-high strength steel, carbon fiber, and plastic are what we work with today,” says Jeremy. “And every time you pull a wire, a sensor is involved — even in replacing a windshield. We have to do pre- and post-repair scans to see what codes are affected.”

As the business changed and Larry grew older, he found his love of the auto body repair business waning. “I used to really love the business, but in my last two years it just became a job,” says Larry. “It was time to retire.” Fortunately for the business, Larry’s replacement was ready, willing, and able. In 2015, Jeremy Stanek and his wife Michelle became the new owners of NW Autoody, and Larry and Nancy subsequently retired to a community just outside of Tuscon, Arizona, where gray and rainy days are a distant memory. 

Since taking over for his dad, Jeremy has been able to accomplish something that Larry had tried unsuccessfully to do: purchase the building that the business has occupied for nearly 40 years. The history of the building dates back to 1947, and Larry speculates that it started its life in some aspect of the automotive business. At one point it was used by the Navy, and may have had a connection as well with a Coca-Cola plant that was located next door. The building’s owner had long resisted Larry’s efforts to buy the building, but finally relented under the weight of deferred maintenance.

It’s at this point in the story that our lives at Meyer Sign intersect with those of the Stanek’s. As the now owners of the NW Autobody building as well as the business, Jeremy and Michelle set about giving the premises a much needed facelift. This included a fresh paint job and new awnings, which proudly proclaim their company’s name. Virtually overnight, the building went from nondescript to outstanding on its corner of Second Street (just a stroll from yet another Meyer Sign customer, 192 Brewing Co., where you can go to celebrate your auto’s restoration).

Jeremy and Michelle have two children of their own now, both of whom are teens, and like her mother-in-law before her, Michelle helps out with office work in addition to her full-time job in the health insurance business, As Jeremy contemplates the future of his industry should one of his kids decide to follow in his footsteps, he sees profound changes looming with the advent of autonomous vehicles and their promise of safer transportation (i.e., fewer crashes). Jeremy is nevertheless sanguine. “I think it will be another 5 or so years before the high-end market develops for driverless cars, and another 10 to 15 years before you really see a bunch of them. I’m hoping that after 20 years I’ll be ready to sell the business…and computers aren’t perfect.”

One thing remains certain for NW Autobody; as long as it does business, the Staneks will continue the standards set by Larry and his partner Woody. As Larry describes it, “Real success in this business is taking pride in your work and earning return customers. Money was never the real goal — it was to make a living and do it with pride. Jeremy has carried that on.” The company website puts it even more succinctly: “All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.” NW Autobody just makes it look easy. At Meyer Sign & Advertising, we know our founder, John Meyer, would have agreed with that as well. It’s how we roll to this day.