He rebuilt a car’s transmission on the kitchen table when he was 12 years old and eventually opened an auto shop with his father.
Now a Jacksonville mechanic is ready to close the bay doors and put up his torque wrench for good.
Terry “Butch” Sumpter will close his shop, Frank’s Auto — named after his father, Frank Sumpter — for good on Thursday so he can start enjoying retirement.
“We started this in 1965,” Sumpter said of the shop.
Sumpter’s sister, Teresa, said the whole family chipped in to build and open Frank’s Auto.
“We built this out of old houses,” Teresa Sumpter said. “On the weekends and after school, our job was to pull nails out of wood.”
Having been around engines since grade school, Butch Sumpter sat Tuesday in an old office chair in his shop, surrounded by old photos of family and friends as he wiped the grease off his hands and talked about his lifelong career in the auto industry.
“I just grew up with it and I don’t know anything else,” he said.
A 1972 graduate of Jacksonville High School, Butch Sumpter laughed as he noted he had no problem with fractions in school because he grew up working with tools.
“Three-eighths, seven-sixteenths, I knew all the fractions,” he said.
Frank Sumpter, who died July 4, retired in 1992 and handed over the keys to the shop to his son. Butch Sumpter has run the business ever since. While he started thinking about retiring about five years ago — “Physically, I have taken aches and pains,” he said — loyalty to his customers kept him coming to work each day.
“I am working with second- and third-generation families,” he said.
He also didn’t want to simply end five decades of a family business, he said.
But smaller auto shops are struggling to compete with larger, corporation-backed shops, he said.
“Small mom and pops have been taking a hit,” Butch Sumpter said, adding that he only works three days a week.
Sumpter would rather close quietly and call it a day, he said.
His wife, Lisa Sumpter, has a different plan.
“Friday, the wife planned a party,” he said. “… If it was up to me, I would lock up and go out the back door.”
Butch Sumpter is sure he’ll still work on cars in his retirement, but it will be on his own time.
He is looking forward to spending time with family, hunting and not having deadlines.
“I have five grandbabies that will take up a lot of my time,” he said.
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