All in the family

By CARRIE KIRSCHNER - The Independent

ASHLAND May 05, 2008 06:04 am

— Making it downtown
Downtown Ashland has seen major transformations during the past 30 years. This is the eighth in a yearlong series examining longtime downtown businesses that have managed to survice — and sometimes thrive — in an ever-changing economy.

On a sunny April morning Steve Jackson stands outside of his downtown tire company laughing and joking with the continuous stream of customers that pulls off 16th Street into his lot.
Jackson is the second generation owner of Gene Jackson Tire Co., the only son of Gene Jackson, whose name the legendary service station still bears. At 61, Jackson says he assumed full responsibility for the company less than 10 years ago, after his father passed away in 1998 after more than 50 years in the tire business.
Steve Jackson says the joke is that his father “started this business the same year he started me.” The year was 1947, when Gene Jackson and his wife, Maxine Jackson, bought the service/ gas station from Avery Smith, who built it in 1937.
Steve Jackson grew up at the service station, which looks very much as it did when he was a child. The Jacksons remodeled the station in 1956 which, in addition to a few other additions, has remained virtually the same, according to Steve. “There is still a lot of 1956 in here.”
Like most children of family-owned businesses, Steve Jackson said he first tried his hand at something else before being drawn back home. “I needed to prove to myself I could do it on my own,” he says.
He attended the University of Kentucky, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in marketing in 1970, although anti-war protests shut down the campus just days before commencement. A member of the Army ROTC at UK, he was immediately sworn into the Army in an informal ceremony around the same time and sent off to train for a pending deployment to Vietnam.
“Then the war just stopped,” Steve Jackson recalled. He said he was sent home and told he owed the Army National Guard eight years of service for his education.
Immediately, he began working at the shop full time but was still “Daddy’s boy,” he says, so he “said goodbye and hitched a ride with Goodyear to finish out the education.”
After a stint as a credit sales manager at Goodyear tire stores in Huntington and Parkersburg, W.Va., and in Chillicothe and Kenton, Ohio, he returned home. His father, he recalls “was making noise about retirement.”
But Gene Jackson never retired. Over the next 25 years, Steve says “I simply filled in for him more and more for better or worse.”
“Old war horses like him and me don’t retire,” he said. “Dad, he just kind of faded away.”
Steve admits he’s thinking of retirement — his wife of 34 years, Nancy, keeps the books at the shop — but when you own a small business, he said, “you just can’t buy a gold watch and walk out the door.”
His employees depend on him and there are always bills to pay. He’d like to pass it along to a protégé who’s been “brought up through the ranks,” but, so far, Jackson says no one has walked through the door interested in being in the tire business. The couple’s only daughter, Valerie, is a surgical technologist in Winchester. “She won’t be back to run a tire store in Ashland, Ky.,” Steve Jackson says.
He adds he knows the odds aren’t in his favor. The last four independent tire dealers to retire, he says, couldn’t sell out. They simply liquidated their inventory and closed their doors for good.
“We’re a dying breed,” he said, but quickly adds. “The market will eventually equalize itself. There is an equilibrium point.”
He points out he’s also watched his biggest competitors — the big box stores — come and go selling tires. “There’s always somebody trying to sell tires a nickel cheaper,” he says.
Steve Jackson says customers keep coming back to his shop not because it sells tires cheaper but because it has built a reputation over the years of “just doing work that needs to be done.” All too often, customers come in for service and relay their stories of dealings with other shops. “It makes my blood boil when I see a garage oversell someone,” he said. “It makes my blood boil when I hear that stuff.”
In fact, Steve Jackson said he tries to educate his customers as much as possible about consumer protection laws regarding car parts and sales.
“It’s a more honest sales pitch,” to do business that way, he said. “I get people who know to come to us. You wouldn’t believe the blank checks that come to us.”
Downtown Ashland, he said, “is a nice place to work and a nice place to do business,” but he too wishes it would grow a bit. Jackson said he thinks the city needs some new construction, but to get that you’ve got to tear something down, he says.
He supports most of Ashland’s efforts to revitalize the downtown business district, although he said city leaders need to be “very cautious and circumspect” in their actions.
He points across the street to Judd Plaza, which is slated for an overhaul in the coming months. If they were to ever close the street down, he says, “it will put us out of business.”
What he’d really like to see, Steve Jackson said, is a good old-fashioned traffic jam. A traffic jam, he said, would mean there are cars and people downtown.
CARRIE KIRSCHNER can be reached at ckirschner@dailyindependent.com or (606) 326-2653.

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