Longtime Jeep Agency Driven Out of Business : Economy: Auto sales were already down, but the riots sealed the fate of dealership that opened in 1926.
It was one pothole-filled road that even the sturdy Jeep could not traverse: the route from recession to riot.
That is why Walker Bros. Jeep-Eagle closed its doors Monday after 66 years in the car business on the same Los Angeles street corner.
There was little final day hoopla. Two last-minute customers wandered in to check out the sticker prices of the four Jeeps still in the dealership’s Olympic Boulevard showroom. A few retired Walker Bros. salesmen and mechanics stopped by to quietly say goodby.
It was a far cry from the days when Walker Bros. drew national attention with its Jeep-selling ploys and its unusual deals with Hollywood celebrities purchasing the hot-selling 4x4 vehicles.
Walker Bros. opened at Olympic Boulevard and Oxford Avenue in 1926 as a two-pump gas station. On the side, brothers Clarence and Elton Walker sold used cars and new Pontiacs consigned by a dealer across town.
They became Nash dealers in the 1940s. When Nash-Kelvinator Co. merged with the Hudson Motor Car Co. in 1954 to create American Motors, the Walkers sold those cars. When Chrysler took over American Motors in 1987, Walker Bros. became the city’s first Jeep dealer.
Monday’s shutdown was greeted with a mixture of anger and relief by Walker family members who had carried the business on after the original two brothers’ deaths.
The anger was that a changing city’s problems had swallowed up the intersection’s four corners. The relief was that the family’s ordeal was finally over.
“Yeah, I’m bitter,” said John Walker, vice president of the company. “I’m bitter that our city is history. L.A.’s been terribly mismanaged. I’m glad to get out of here.”
Walker, 56, is the son of Elton Walker. Dealership co-owner and President Doug Didriksen, 66, is the nephew of the founding brothers.
Didriksen said the recession left the dealership teetering. The company sold $16 million worth of cars in 1988-89. Last year, it sold $8 million.
But the city’s changing climate gave Walker Bros. the final shove, he said. Mounting crime--from sophisticated credit scams to nighttime break-ins--”took the fun out of it.”
Salesmen sometimes watched drug deals from their showroom windows. Customers would be harassed by drunken transients who sometimes passed out in front of the sales lots. A Department of Motor Vehicles representative was mugged when she stepped from the showroom. Horrified employees once watched as a man was stabbed to death next to the used-car lot. “If the truth be known, that’s why I’m getting out,” Didriksen said.
Walker said: “The envelope was licked. The riots sealed it.”
During the riots after the not guilty verdicts for the officers accused of beating Rodney G. King, Walker Bros. was repeatedly hit by looters who stole four cars, the firm’s computer system and some tools, family members said.
Didriksen’s son, company operations manager Darrell Didriksen, 43, was attacked by a mob as he hurried from home to protect the showroom during the height of the looting, the family said.
Business dropped off dramatically after the riots; Doug Didriksen said customers were afraid to venture onto fire-scarred Olympic Boulevard.
For Monday’s closing, Walker Bros. brought in a placement expert to help the company’s 53 employees find new jobs, Darrell Didriksen said. About 15 will stay indefinitely to continue running a Jeep repair shop in the 1920s-style garage next door to the showroom. And the family may try to sell used cars at the site until its lease runs out next year.
After that, a Korean developer plans a project on the site.
But nothing will ever replace the rollicking car days, Walker Bros. old-timers remembered Monday. Like the time the company launched a tongue-in-cheek 1986 campaign to “Keep the Jeep”--the old “civilian Jeep” version of the utility vehicle that was phased out in 1987. Although it failed, it became a national movement.
Retirees such as Joe Allison, 73, of Encino, who worked for 40 years as a service manager before retiring in 1986, and Joe Shatum, 85, of Century City, a salesman for 20 years, reminisced about Sylvester Stallone and other Hollywood stars who purchased Jeeps from Walker Bros.--and about the salesman who personally delivered a bow-wrapped Jeep to singer Donna Summer at Lake Tahoe.
“I got sick when I heard they were closing,” said John Garabedian, 79, of Hancock Park, who sold cars for the dealership for 35 years before retiring in 1991. He gazed at “salesmen of the month” plaques from the 1980s on the showroom walls. His name was repeatedly listed on the engraved brass.
“But the area has changed,” he said. “Times have changed. We used to leave the keys in the cars on the lot. It finally got to the point we couldn’t leave the keys in cars in the showroom.”
At the end of the afternoon, Doug Didriksen handed over the Jeep franchise papers to E. Don Sitt, Los Angeles zone manager for the Chrysler Corp. The two remaining unsold new Jeeps would be sent to another dealer. The end had come.
