An Awards Show the Man on the Street Can Get Behind

People say Hollywood has too darn many awards shows. Not surprisingly, the trend may be spreading to other industries.

Including, dare I say, tow truck operators.

Yep. The Auto Club of Southern California has cited 37 of its more then 300 tow truck contractors in a 13-county area with its first annual “Service Pro Award.”

I confess to having wondered if a “best of the best” of tow truck operators was really merited.

When I think of the industry, I think of burly guys who, if they can’t tow your car, could probably carry it to the shop. I think of guys who, as they’re hooking up your car, flick their cigarette onto your front seat.

Luckily, Keith Geer laughs at that. “That’s the image we’re trying not to portray,” says Geer, who calls his crew “technicians.”

A youthful-looking and tidy 46, Geer could pass for a college professor. I’m not even sure he has grease under his fingernails.

He’s one of three family partners in Geer’s Towing of Anaheim, one of two Orange County companies the Auto Club cited this month at a suit-and-tie dinner at a posh Long Beach restaurant. Mandic Motors in Huntington Beach was the other local honoree.

So, I say to Geer, I thought all you tow truck guys were the same: You get the call, you drive out, you hook your truck to the disabled vehicle, you drive away.

He smiles politely and looks at me as if I’d just locked the keys in my car.

“There’s a little more to it than that,” he says. “Just like you might go to one grocery store over another because of quality of service, we try to promote high quality.”

In other words, it’s a people business.

And you know how people can get.

“They’ll have been waiting for up to 30 minutes and sometimes longer for the truck to arrive, and it’s really, really hard for the technician when a person is already mad at you and you haven’t done a thing,” Geer says. “They say, ‘I’ve been standing in the hot sun for 30 minutes on the side of the freeway. I could have been killed.’ ”

Your drivers are nicer than other companies’? I ask.

“We try to be nicer, try to be more professional,” Geer says. “All of our drivers have trucks that are white with Auto Club stripes. All the drivers wear, hopefully, clean uniforms. During the course of the day, they’re allowed to get dirty, but they start the day with a clean uniform.”

Nor is the actual towing simply muscle work, he says. You need ingenuity and training. The company has “volumes and volumes” of manuals, designed to solve any problem, he says.

“Manufacturers are not thinking how these cars are going to be towed when they build them,” Geer says. “Every car has a different spot where you have to attach--either to pull it up on the flatbed or lift and tow it. If you don’t use the right hookup point, you can damage the vehicle very easily.”

Tell me something the public doesn’t know about towing, I ask.

Geer pauses. “You’d never dream that a car could end up in a tree.”

You’re right, I say. But it’s happened, he says, when a car careened down a steep embankment and wound up in a big oak tree.

The Auto Club award capped 17 years in the business for the company (run by two Geer brothers and father Jack).

“It’s not like going to the Academy Awards, but I was quite pleased,” Geer says of the awards dinner. “It represented a lot of hard work. They really scrutinized us.”

Still, Geer laments the lack of public respect for tow truck drivers:

“Occasionally when it rains, on the news you’ll see the peace officers and reporter standing there, and the cops are giving interviews and the reporters are saying, ‘CHP is out here, rain or shine, doing their job.’

“And if you look behind them, you’ll see the tow truck guy crawling under a car in the mud, pulling a guy’s car out.”

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821, by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail at dana.parsons@latimes.com.