101 Corvette Closes After Lengthy Tenure
Steve Pyles landed in Macomb 57 years ago from Fort Wayne, IN at the age of 16 when his father, a Baptist preacher, was assigned to a church in the rural, west central Illinois community. After moving from townto- town (and state-to-state) over the years, it was a place that seemed like home to the Pyles' family, so it's where they stayed and put down roots. It was also where Steve decided to stay and built a thriving business that recently shuttered its doors after 44 years.
The longtime owner of 101 Corvette Paint and Body Shop closed his doors for good May 22. The building at 101 S. College Street is currently on the market through Remax. The Community News Brief recently sat down with Pyles to talk about his decision to retire and what's next.
Like many seasoned mechanics and auto body repair pros, Pyles is a self-made, and self-taught, man. While his dad was a preacher, he was also a builder, and it was how a young Pyles, working alongside his father building the family's houses as they went from town-to-town, learned to work with his hands. And it was his first car at 16, which was wrecked in an accident, where he first learned how to repair a damaged vehicle. However, before he ventured into the world of auto body repair, he used that construction experience building pole barns.
'I did that for a while, but the work slowed down to just a few days a week in the winter, so I was looking for something else to do,' he explained. 'I started as an apprentice at Car Care Center, and got out of the construction business.'
After a three-year stint at Car Care and learning the ins-and-outs of the body shop business, Pyles struck out on his own, renting a space, complete with an overhead door, behind his parents Bible bookstore. He worked on cars there for about six months, and then moved to a slightly larger rented space in the old Macomb Autobody building, where he stayed for three years. Then it was on to a rented building on East Carroll Street until, finally, in 1982, he rented the original 101 building on College Street – a simple wooden structure – until he bought the building in 1986.
'After I bought that wooden building, there was a house on the corner and I started tearing it down, by hand. I was young and dumb,' he said with a laugh.
It took him a few months to dismantle the home, all while continuing to work on cars in that little wood building out back. Once again, he used his construction skills – and experience building pole barns – to put up a larger building in 1987, where the current 101 building still sits today. The building was put together in sections over the years as his business expanded, but that first section was based on the size of the trusses he found.
'I found some 40 x 60 trusses for sale through an ad in the paper, so that was how I built the first section of the building,' Pyles said. 'I was used to building pole barns, so that's how I built my shop.'
And just like when he was tearing down the house, he continued to work on cars while building the new home for his business. When asked how he did all of this, he was quick to answer that it goes back to his upbringing.
'I've worked all my life. I had my first job as a paperboy when I was nine, and my dad was involved in all sorts of things, and I built houses with him ever since I had been in my teens,' Pyles recalled. 'I've always used my hands, my brain, my mind and I could always build and fix things. I didn't learn to play growing up, I learned to work instead.'
When asked if he's going to learn how to play in retirement, he said he 'hopes to,' but when asked what he'd like to do in retirement, Pyles laughed again, and said 'work.' While he doesn't have any immediate hobbies in mind, he has a few acres around his house that he'll take care of now that he has some spare time. In the meantime; however, he's still working on cleaning out 44 years' worth of business from 101 Corvette.
Speaking of 101 Corvette, how did the shop get its name, besides Pyles being a Corvette man? He's had three of the fiberglass muscle cars in his lifetime, including his first Corvette in the early 70s, which he sold for a station wagon that he drove to California where he lived for a short while – but that's another story for another time. The previous business in that little wooden structure on College Street had to have an address for mail, so the owners put big numbers – 101 – on the building's west side.
'I didn't want to call it Steve's Body Shop, and I was good at fiberglass repair and I liked Corvettes and I wanted to specialize on Corvettes, so it became 101 Corvette Paint and Body Shop,' Pyles explained.
Pyles had met the love of his life, his wife, Melodye, who passed away 11 years ago, before opening his own shop, and with her help and support, he got 101 off the ground.
'She was a big help establishing the business,' he said.
The couple had two sons and a daughter (Mandy still lives in Macomb and works for the Regional Office of Education #26; his sons live in Colorado and Georgia, so some traveling might be in Pyles' future). They hung at the shop periodically, but didn't take to auto body repair like their dad did.
'My kids had time to play,' he laughed.
While his kids didn't work in the business, he had plenty of long-time employees, including Bill Gillenwater, who joined 101 in 2000 when Pyles wanted to add spray-on truck bedliners to the business, so he added on yet again to the building and Gillenwater took on that work. Rusty Hodges had been his painter since 2012; Clint Roberts was his body man since 2014 and Cindy Thomas had served as his office manager since 2018. Over the years, Pyles estimated he had over 30 employees work for him, and he guessed he's probably worked on over 40,000 cars over the years.
'The business definitely isn't what it was when I first started. The body work is what we started with, as well as my wife and I doing detailing work on used cars for Mac Ford Lincoln Mercury, but then it evolved into collision repair later,' he pointed out. 'Dealing with the insurance companies on claims has been one of the more challenging parts of the job, and we've had to evolve with the technology as it has changed with the cars. They’ve consistently changed, so we had to consistently change and learn, and we were also the first shop to computerize our office system in 1990.'
The shop was open from 8 a.m.-5 p.m., five days a week, with Pyles rolling in around 10 a.m. (which he jokingly said was a problem when he worked for other people – he just couldn’t get there by 8 a.m.). However, that late start was also because he was most often still working at 11 p.m. or midnight almost every night. Once he got started it was hard for him to stop working, he said.
Pyles proudly stated when asked if there was something he couldn't fix over the years that, while he may have wondered how he was going to repair a vehicle, he always managed to.
'There was nothing I really couldn't fix,' he said. 'Some were challenging, but I fixed them when I got the equipment I needed to.
'Besides being my own boss, the part of the job I've really liked is returning vehicles to pre-collision status and pleasing people with their fully-restored vehicles. I learned the trade as I went along, I guess through the School of Hard Knocks,' Pyles added. 'It has always been a thrill to restore vehicles to how they were originally built. I'll miss my customers; I've met a lot of diverse people over the years. I've loved the
