Spare Attraction : Tire Shop’s Macaw Is Just One of the Guys

Life sometimes seems like all lug nuts and rubber down at the Tire Man shop on Thousand Oaks Boulevard.

That is, until old Rommel the parrot peeks his beak out from behind a pile of spares.

The 15-year-old military macaw has been at the shop longer than any employee--and to hear them tell it, the bright blue-and-gold bird is one of the guys, even if he has never balanced a tire or done an alignment.

“We all love him here,” said Hector Hernandez, 46, who has been working with Rommel for five years. “Everybody loves Rommel, and he loves everybody.”

Indeed, whether he is sitting on his wooden perch in the garage or out beneath his favorite sycamore tree, Rommel has become such a fixture at Tire Man that many people recall the bird more vividly than the shop, manager Paul Saylors said.

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“People call up and say, ‘Are you the guys with that bird? I’ll be right over,’ ” said Saylors, who runs the family owned shop. “People remember him, so they remember us.”

Not that Rommel says much. Other than an occasional “hello,” nary a word comes out of his huge, powerful beak. But when visitors come to Tire Man--especially children--the macaw turns into a clownish performer, tossing around and comically shaking his head to get their attention.

“I think he’s a gas,” said Bonnie Sheperd of Thousand Oaks, waiting in the office as workers put a new set of tires on her ’55 Chevy. “It just adds something to the ambience.

“One time I came in here and a tire blew up,” added Sheperd, who has been frequenting the shop for more than a decade. “That ruffled his feathers a little bit.”

True to his name, Rommel has been known to get into a territorial scrap or two in his day. In fact, he had a sidekick named Charlie for about 10 years until last year, when an after-hours brawl at the garage left Charlie badly wounded.

That’s Rommel, say the garage workers. They attribute his short fuse with store-bred Charlie and his laconic nature to a childhood in the tropical wilderness of Guatemala.

Yet they know that at this point, Rommel feels most at home at the garage. Saylors and his employees make no efforts to keep Rommel at bay. And he often flies away--usually to a large palm tree about a mile east of the tire store.

“But he always comes back,” said Edgar Urizar, who has been working with Rommel for 14 years. “We never have to worry about him.”

Macaws are actually a Tire Man tradition dating back to Bob Nance, who started the chain more than 15 years ago in Simi Valley. Nance brought macaws to the Simi store, and they proved to be a huge success with customers and workers alike. His business partner, Bill Saylors, soon followed suit, bringing Rommel to his Tire Man store in Thousand Oaks.

Nance has sold his interest in Tire Man and moved to Northern California. But the new owner of the Simi Tire Man, Jim Farpelha, decided to continue the tradition five years ago by purchasing four macaws of different colors from Africa and South America.

There is also a new bird at Tire Man nowadays--a Catalina macaw named Dunlop that the owners bought about a year ago. But no one is expecting old Rommel to pass away--not for a long time: The birds are known to live as long as 45 years.

“He’ll outlive all of us,” Sheperd said. “And I bet he’ll outlive my tires.”