Legends from the Saturn Detail Bay: Part 1

Back in high school, I had two jobs to keep myself afloat: Three days a week at a local garage and another three at Saturn of Raleigh. SoR was an honest dealership hawking a “different” car to off-beat, yet loyal customers. This was the early 2000s, and the Saturn dealer—with its plastic-panel-beating antics—was a busy place. Management was always looking for high schoolers to employ, a need expressed via ads in the local paper. It was not particularly engaging work, but there was a steady schedule, free popcorn, and $7 per hour to be earned.

Looking back on it, perhaps the longest-lasting payment it offered was the memories it generated. So please, grab some free popcorn from the machine, sneak a customer-only hot chocolate (just between the TV and wall of 5×7 glossy photos of crashed cars), and come with me down memory lane.

My duties were as follows: When a tech came around the building with a freshly serviced car, one of us (among the two or three young guns working that day) would scrub the wheels and bumpers, put a carnation in the center of the dashboard, and run it through the car wash before handing the keys back over to the owner.

The carnation on the dashboard was intended as a symbol of friendship and loyalty we extended to the customer. Some regulars would put in a color request—pink, yellow, or red—with the service writer …. who would tip off the mechanic … who would trickle the information down to the detail crew. We’d pick a flower in the requested hue to help soften the blow of an oil change or head gasket repair bill. If there was no request for a particular color, we’d draw the least withered and broken bloom from the black bucket of stagnant water, snip off the end, dry it off, and Bob’s your uncle. It usually went over pretty well with the owner.

In one particular case, it did not. The customer read the gesture with a, let’s say, unique subtext.

As I pulled around in his dripping L100 sedan, a gruff, arms-crossed man with a crew cut stood stoic and eyed me as I backed the car under our service awning. I left the keys in the car, greeted him, and headed back to get the next car in line.

“Hey, what the f*** is this supposed to mean?!” he yelled, elevating the carnation over his head by the stem.

“Everyone gets them, sir,” I explained. My hope was to extinguish his notion that this was some kind of bizarre, random act of flirtation. Nevertheless disgusted, he huffed, “Well, I don’t f***ing want it!” and threw the carnation on the ground before driving off.

Right-o. Let the record show that the next guy didn’t seem to have a problem with his re-gifted carnation.

Driving a countless stream of nearly identical Saturns through the same carwash, over and over, was monotonous. Doing so, however, provided a wealth of statistical data on Saturn’s demographic breakdown. In my estimation, there were four categories in the Raleigh area:

Saturn Type #1: Religious Iconographers

Whether it was a hanging rosary, and air freshener of JC, a bumper sticker encouraging Buddhism, or a tribute to patron saints of auto safety, GM managed to strike a spiritual chord with its owners. Saturn people were usually kind, clean, quiet, and (with one notable exception) never swore at me for giving them a carnation.

Religious Iconographer Radio: Often tuned to NPR or a station from which a fiery preacher bellowed through the speakers.

Saturn Type #2: Dog People

You’d smell it as soon as you got into the car. There were other clues: the line of smudges painted on every window at dog-nose height, the fur that stuck to and embedded itself in your branded Saturn jacket. I’m not sure that I ever saw these dog/Saturn owners with my own eyes; I’d usually bail out gagging and beating the hair off of my clothing.

Dog Person Radio: Off and smudged.

Saturn Type #3: Chain Smokers

I specifically remember getting multiple requests through the service department to clean the windows of cars that had clearly been Virginia-Slim-hotboxed since new. The thick, yellow tar would take at least a dozen paper towels to clear from the window glass, compared with a Dog Person Saturn that took three and a Religious Iconography Saturn which usually took two. Mountain Dew cans filled with damp cigarette butts haphazardly tossed in the back seat—that wasall the anti-smoking campaign your then-teenage author needed.

Chain Smoker Radio: The non-CD-player optioned cars were usually dialed into an AM news station.

Saturn Type #3: College Students on the Right Track

A Saturn was not the car with which to engage in juvenile, hooligan activities. It was better suited to the track-and-field meet or debate club sort of kid. A purple Saturn SL1 automatic coupe was a fitting and respected reward for a 4.0 GPA and scholarship student bound for Wake Forest. Even though it was probably not legally their car, these young people always took an interest in the services the mechanics performed to their car. They’d also often ask us lowly detail scrubs when the car needed to come back next.

College Student on the Right Track Radio: One of the 60+ CDs suspended from the sun visor would play automatically upon key-on, always at 9/10ths volume.

***

We had several characters working on and off in the detail area: Pat, an aspiring rapper from the country, spent every minute of his idle work time detailing his grandmother’s gleaming, black Olds Ninety-Eight or polishing friends’ vehicles. (The latter were strategically hidden in the lot to resemble unprocessed trade-ins, thus avoiding Management Detection.) Pat was a serial side-hustler. He’d buy half-gallons of sweet tea from the neighboring Bojangles for $1.89, spike them with peach brandy stored in the trunk of the Oldsmobile, and flip them to the sales and service team members for $7. Seven bucks seemed steep for such a thing, but for a handful of hungover salesmen who had no other means of relief on a slow Saturday, it was sweet nonetheless.

In general, everyone at the dealership was well-behaved. But temptation and opportunity did get the better of two staffers—a detail manager and a salesman. It happened when they became stranded in an ice storm while working late one Friday. With the highways all closed, the duo hiked over to the gas station and set themselves, procured a case of beer, and got to drinking. In the morning, they awoke to a showroom littered with empty cans amid the usual buffet of gleaming plastic cars. Unfortunately there were still several inches of snow on the ground, and thus, still no way to get home.

One of the many fringe benefits of working at Saturn of Raleigh was the opportunity to be on a dealership-sponsored “race team” at Wake County Speedway. Basically, we’d drag a heavily beaten Saturn SL2 Coupe to races. As a group of people, we were more like a legion sworn to defend one another in a pit brawl than a proper motorsport team.

Sacred duties included supporting the cars—one of the few front-wheel drivers out there at the time—and, of course, fighting people in defense of our composite body panels. The car itself landed in our midst because of a buyback involving several automatic-transmission-equipped coupes and a corporate recall campaign. Rather than be scrapped (as corporate suggested), our SL2 got a five-speed manual swap and a safety cage. Race prep included power-washing the car, buying beer, and making weapons to fend off panel thieves.

In a time where Pintos and Fox-body Mustangs dominated the circle track, our competitive and wrong-wheel-drive Saturn was absolutely despised. Couple that with the rowdy folk who frequent Northeast Wake County and it race days frequently involved calls to the local constabulary.

On slow days, or after hours, it was considered okay to tinker on your own stuff.  My co-worker, Jordan, had an E30 BMW with a fresh Maaco spray job—clean as could be. Pat’s Olds was spotless, too. Rob’s brand-new V-6 Mustang was pretty cherry … until he spaced off the exhaust flange with washers and later cracked the transmission case while changing his gear oil.

My stuff? Well, my Studebaker and Corolla were always spotless, but one or the other was always waylaid for some repair or modification. One evening, about a half-hour before closing, one of the dealer’s mechanics loaned me his air tools so I could tear down a junkyard 4A-GE twin-cam motor. (I had just bought to rebuild and swap into my track-prepped Corolla.) What better place to do this than in a spotless mechanic’s bay? I hooked up the gun to the hose we used to blow out vents and ash trays, from there ugga-dugga-ing the motor to bits. Just as the pan and windage tray came loose, so did three quarts of oil and no fewer than three cylinders worth of connecting rods and pistons.

Should have pulled the drain plug first, I guess.

I spent the next two hours listening to the drone of the local NC State radio station, repeatedly spraying the floor with ‘Purple Stuff,” and mopping up my failure.

I could go on and on. And if you want me to, I will, in subsequent articles! Would I go back and do it again, dog-nose smudges and all? You bet, but maybe not for hot chocolate and seven bucks an hour.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.