C 678-407-1947
bennypam@windstream.net
Pamiebox@windstream.net
I have always loved to work on things. As a child, I would take our toys apart to figure out how they worked and as a teenager, a high school friend and I turned a chicken coop into a workshop where we dragged abandoned and cheaply purchased cars, Chevy’s Buicks, Old’s, etc., repaired them and sold them. I recall we had one good battery between them, but we were able to do well enough to make a couple of hundred dollars on each one. By 16, we got cars of our own. The chicken house deal fell away, but not my interest in cars. After High School, I worked as a machinist at Scientific Atlanta. Pam and I met in 1986 and we were married in 1988. In 1994 I bought a 1965 Chevy truck. A local shop was working on a 1930 Model A Ford Truck and we worked out a deal that he would paint my Chevy if I would help work on the Model A. After driving it, I knew I had to find one for myself and a few weeks later, we found a dilapidated 1930 Tudor Sedan, with a good body in a barn near my home in Dacula. During the restoration over the next year, I met Mike Butcher, of Mike’s “A” Ford-able parts. The Tudor came out fine, and my wife Pam and I still drive it regularly. We also have a 1928 Pickup, a 1929 Closed cab pickup and a 1931 stripped down Huckster. In 1996, while I was still working as a full-time machinist, Mike began to refer customers to me, at first engine and brake jobs, but is wasn’t long before I had full restoration customers in my small shop. This was all in the evenings, after work. When my employer decided to move the business to Mexico in 1998, after I had been working there for 20 years, I was laid off. I figured I would work on the Model A’s full time until I needed a “real job.” Pam jumped in and handled office backup and billing. By 2006, the business was burgeoning and I moved Bentley’s Antique Auto Service into our much larger present facility in Maysville… thankfully, I still haven’t needed to find a “real job” since.
